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Boned Chicken
I pair of year old chickens 1 cup of stale bread crumbs ½ pound of sausage meat 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley 1 cup of stale bread crumbs 1 teaspoonful of salt 1 teaspoonful of onion juice 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper Singe the chickens, cut off the heads and feet. The one that has the smoothest and best skin should be boned carefully for the outside; the other one may be used for the inside.
The text as printed breaks off after the boning instruction, and the crumbs are listed twice, so treat this as a framework for a classic galantine rather than a complete method. The hinge is the boning: the outer bird's skin must come away in one unbroken sheet, because it is the casing that holds everything together.
- Duplicated ingredient"1 cup of stale bread crumbs" appears twice in the list, almost certainly a typesetting or transcription repeat rather than two separate cups. One cup is the likely intent; two cups of crumbs to 1½ lb of sausage meat would give a noticeably drier, breadier forcemeat.
- "Year old chickens"A bird kept a full year is a mature fowl rather than a young broiler: firmer flesh and more connective tissue, and typically a heavier carcass than a spring chicken. A modern supermarket bird of similar weight is far younger and more tender, so expect a softer result and less cooking than the original would have needed.
- Sausage meatThis means plain bulk pork sausage, not links and not anything smoked or sweetened. Whatever the period norm, avoid a lean modern sausage here: without enough fat the stuffing will be crumbly when sliced cold.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate it and squeeze it in a cloth. A teaspoonful takes roughly a quarter of a medium onion. It flavours without leaving visible pieces in a forcemeat that will be sliced.
- SingeingThis removes remaining pinfeathers and down from a hand-plucked bird. Commercially dressed chicken rarely needs it; pull any stray pinfeathers with tweezers instead.
- Boning the outer birdWork from a cut down the backbone, keeping the knife against the bone and the skin intact, and leave the wing and drumstick bones out. The second chicken is stripped of its meat, which is chopped or ground with the sausage, crumbs, parsley, salt, onion juice and pepper to make the filling.
- The missing cooking stepA galantine of this kind is rolled tightly, tied or wrapped in cheesecloth, and poached in stock at a bare simmer, not boiled, until the centre reaches 165F on an instant-read thermometer. A roll of this size takes on the order of an hour and a half to two hours. The raw pork filling makes the thermometer non-negotiable.
- Serving and yieldThis is a dish for eating cold: press the cooked roll under a weight as it chills so it slices cleanly, then serve in thin rounds with the jellied stock. Two birds plus 1½ lb of sausage makes a substantial roll that will stretch a long way as a thin-sliced cold course, though the original gives no yield.
Boned and stuffed poultry of this type is a galantine, a dish generally traced to French professional cookery, where a bird is boned, filled with a forcemeat made partly from its own flesh, rolled, poached in stock and served cold in slices with its own jelly. The appeal of such a dish in warm weather is obvious: the work is done early, the roll chills, and it is carved cold with no fire needed at the last minute. The two-bird arrangement is economical in its own right -- the second chicken supplies the meat for the stuffing, and the carcasses and trimmings would make gelatinous stock to set around the finished roll, though the recipe as printed says only to cut the feet off and does not mention stock at all.