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Baked Chicken
Dress, clean, and cut up two chickens. Place in a dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and dot over with one-fourth cup butter. Bake thirty minutes in a hot oven, basting every five minutes with one-fourth cup butter melted in one-fourth cup boiling water. Serve with gravy made by using fat in pan, one-fourth cup flour, one cup each Chicken Stock and cream, salt and pepper.
A plain roasting-pan chicken from the era when a bird arrived whole and unplucked. The method still works; the timing assumes birds far smaller than what a supermarket sells.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to thirty minutesTwo 1900-era chickens were perhaps 2 to 2.5 lb each, and jointed pieces from birds that size do cook through in about half an hour. Modern broiler pieces are half again as heavy and will need 40 to 50 minutes; go by 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- "Hot oven"425 to 450F. At that heat the flour dredge browns quickly, so watch the pan after the first 20 minutes and drop to 375F if the drippings threaten to scorch.
- "Dress, clean, and cut up"Plucking, singeing and drawing the bird, then jointing it. Buy two 3 to 3.5 lb chickens cut into eighths, or an equivalent weight of bone-in thighs and breasts.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting pan, not a deep casserole. Depth traps steam and defeats the browning the dredge is there to produce; arrange the pieces skin up in one layer with a little space between them.
- Basting every five minutesOpening the oven that often costs more heat than the basting gains. Three or four times over the cooking is plenty. The quarter cup butter melted into a quarter cup boiling water is essentially a basting emulsion; keep it warm on the stove so it does not chill the pan.
- The gravy proportionsA quarter cup flour to two cups liquid gives a fairly thick gravy. Pour off all but about a quarter cup of pan fat, cook the flour in it for a minute or two before adding the stock and cream, and scrape up the browned dredge stuck to the pan.
- YieldTwo birds serve six to eight. The recipe halves cleanly for one chicken, including the butter and the gravy.
This is roasting reduced to its simplest terms: salt, pepper, a flour dredge for colour, butter for basting, and the pan drippings turned into a cream gravy. Cookbooks of the period commonly gave roasting a bird whole and "baking" it cut up as separate recipes. The instruction to "dress" the chickens is a reminder that poultry generally reached the kitchen with feathers and innards intact, which is why American cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often open their poultry chapters with instructions on plucking, singeing and drawing before any recipe appears. The cream in the gravy marks this as a comfortable household dish rather than an economical one.