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Pickled Chicken
Clean, draw and boil a fowl until tender, using as little water as possible. When very tender, remove the meat from the bones, and place it in glass jars Take sufficient broth to half fill the jars, and add to it an equal quantity of vinegar; add a dozen whole cloves, a small onion sliced, a bay leaf and a blade of mace, pour this over the chicken and stand aside to cool. When cold, cover and stand over night, and it is ready for use. Garnish with tender salad leaves.
A cold-larder dish from the era before household refrigeration, and the one place it needs updating is storage rather than method. Everything else is straightforward once the old poultry terms are translated.
- Refrigerate, do not leave out overnightThe original assumes a cool cellar or larder. Cool the jars quickly, cover, and hold them in the refrigerator; the vinegar slows spoilage but does not preserve cooked poultry at room temperature. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle good for three or four days, not a shelf-stable preserve.
- "A fowl" is not a broilerA fowl meant a mature laying hen, 4-6 lb, with enough collagen to give a broth that sets. A supermarket roasting chicken works but yields thinner liquid; a stewing hen or a few pounds of bone-in thighs and drumsticks is closer to the intent.
- "As little water as possible"This is the point of the instruction: barely cover the bird so the broth stays concentrated, since it becomes half the pickling liquid. A weak broth gives a watery, flat result. Simmer gently, never at a rolling boil, for 1.5-2 hours for an older bird.
- Equal broth and vinegarHalf the jar broth, half vinegar, which lands around 2.5 percent acetic acid once mixed if you use standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. Do not use a reduced-strength or salad vinegar here, and do not dilute further.
- A blade of maceOne flat piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, not ground mace. If you cannot find blades, a very small pinch of grated nutmeg stands in, though it will cloud the liquid.
- Season the brothThe recipe gives no salt at any stage. Taste the broth before adding the vinegar and correct it then; cold pickled meat needs more salt than hot.
- Yield and servingA 5 lb fowl will fill roughly two quart jars and serve six or so as a cold main course. Lift the meat out with a fork, let it drain a moment, and serve on lettuce or other tender leaves as directed, with brown bread and butter.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks written for the months when no one wanted to light a range: the work is done once, early in the day, and eaten cold for days afterwards. Pickled or "soused" meats were a common answer, and the technique is old and thoroughly European -- vinegar, cloves, bay and mace are the same aromatics used for soused fish, pickled pork and the German Sülze that pickled chicken resembles. The gelatine in an old hen's broth can leave the liquid setting to a soft jelly around the meat, which may be why the recipe insists on as little water as possible; the vinegar both flavours it and buys a few extra days in a period when a cool cellar was the only refrigeration many kitchens had. Glass canning jars, cheap and widely available by the 1880s, are used here simply as convenient cold-storage vessels rather than for any sealed preserving.