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Salt and Cayenne (Skin a cold turkey or fowl)
Skin a cold turkey or fowl; take off the fillets of the breast and all the white meat from the wings, side bones, and merry-thought; put one ounce of butter and half an ounce of flour into a stewpan and mix them together over the fire; then stir in one pint of white stock; add a blade of mace, a shalot chopped finely, the juice of half a lemon, and a small piece of lemon-peel, a little salt, and a few grains of cayenne. Let this boil till the flour is cooked, then add the cream. Put in the meat and let it simmer a few minutes till the meat is warm through. While this is cooking take the legs and back of the fowl, sprinkle them with pepper and salt, and broil them a nice brown. Serve with the broiled pieces laid on or round the pulled fowl. Before serving take out the mace and lemon-peel.
This is the Victorian dish usually called "pulled and broiled fowl" — cold roast poultry given a second life as a white fricassee with crisp broiled bones alongside. The recipe assumes you already have a cooked bird and a pot of stock.
- The cream quantity is missingThe method says "add the cream" without ever listing it among the ingredients. Something in the region of 2 to 4 fl oz would suit a pint of stock thickened with 1 oz butter and ½ oz flour; add it off the boil and do not let the sauce boil hard afterwards.
- Merry-thoughtThe wishbone, and by extension the wedge of breast meat sitting over it. "Side bones" are the small pieces taken from the lower part of the carcass, towards the thigh joint.
- Pulled means torn, not slicedThe white meat should be pulled into finger-length shreds along the grain rather than cut. Shreds hold sauce; slices sit in it and shed.
- UnitsA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so use 2½ US cups of stock. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; half an ounce of flour is about 2 tablespoons loosely measured.
- ShalotA single small shallot, chopped as finely as you can manage — it goes in unsoftened and, unlike the mace and lemon-peel, is never taken out again, so anything coarse will read as crunch.
- The hinge: the meat is only being warmedThe poultry is already cooked. Once it goes into the sauce, give it three or four minutes at a bare simmer. Held longer, the breast shreds turn dry and stringy however much cream is in the pan.
- Broiling the legs"Broil" means cooking over direct heat on a gridiron; under a modern hot broiler, legs and back from a cold bird will want roughly 8 to 12 minutes, turned once, and take colour better for a wipe of butter before the salt and pepper.
- A blade of maceA single dried piece of nutmeg aril, not ground mace. If you have only ground, use a pinch and accept that you cannot fish it out again as the recipe instructs at the end.
- YieldThe white meat of one turkey or fowl in a pint of sauce serves four as a lunch or supper dish, with a leg or a piece of back apiece.
Pulled fowl belongs to the large Victorian repertoire of dishes built on the remains of yesterday's roast, and versions of it appear in a number of nineteenth-century English cookery books. The trick of the dish is the deliberate contrast: the white meat is shredded and finished in a delicate lemon-and-mace sauce, while the legs and carcass, which never reheat gracefully in sauce, are seasoned sharply and broiled brown — pushed further, with mustard, the same treatment was called "devilled". The strange title looks like an artefact of indexing rather than the cook's name for the dish.