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Pepper and Salt (Cut up the onion and cook it)
Cut up the onion and cook it in the butter; cut up the chicken into neat joints, add it to the onion, also the stock, pepper and salt, and let it all stew gently for half an hour. Peel the potatoes, cut them into slices not too thin, add these to the chicken and stew gently until the potatoes are cooked; just before dishing up break the raw egg over, dish up neatly, and serve.
A plain braise of chicken, onion and potato, given here without any quantities — the ingredient list has been separated from the method, as often happened in books written for cookery-school students who worked from a dictated list. The proportions below are a reasonable reconstruction for a competent cook.
- Quantities to work withA 3-4 lb chicken jointed into eight, one large onion, about 1 oz (2 tbsp) butter, 1 to 1 1/2 lb potatoes and roughly a pint (2 cups) of stock — enough to come halfway up the meat, not to cover it. One egg is all the method calls for.
- "Neat joints"Two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and each breast halved across the bone. Bone-in pieces are the point: they hold together through the stew and give the thin stock some body.
- Stew gently means barely tremblingA hard boil will shred the breast and cloud the liquid. Keep it at the faintest simmer, lid on, for the half hour before the potatoes go in.
- Potatoes "not too thin"Cut them about 1/2 inch thick and choose a waxy variety. Floury potatoes will collapse into the stock in the twenty to thirty minutes they need, which is fine if you want a thickened stew but not what the recipe describes.
- Cook the chicken throughBreast pieces are done at 165F at the bone; thighs are better nearer 175F. The full sequence here gives roughly an hour of gentle cooking, which is ample, but check rather than trust the clock.
- The eggBroken over the surface at the last moment, it sets in threads and streaks in the hot liquid rather than making a sauce. It will not reach a pasteurising temperature in that time, so use a pasteurised egg if you are cooking for anyone frail, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- Season at the endStock reduces over the hour and salt added at the start concentrates, so taste it before it leaves the pan.
- YieldFour as a main course with bread, six as a lighter course.
In late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery-school books an entrée was not a main course but a made dish served between the fish and the roast — something composed and portioned, rather than a joint carved at table — though nothing on this page shows how the book itself classed this dish. It is a plain one: chicken, onion, potato and stock. Homely titles of this kind were common in teaching manuals, where the aim was to give pupils a repertoire of cheap dishes alongside the elaborate ones, and jointing a whole bird rather than buying portions was simply how poultry came. The finishing egg, broken raw over the surface of a hot stew, appears in a number of European traditions as an economy — it enriches without the trouble of a separate liaison, and no yolk or white is wasted.