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Poultry: Roast
Roast Chicken. 4-pound chicken. 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful cornstarch, cupful boiling water.
Singe the chicken, wash it quickly in cold water, then dry with a towel; season inside and out with salt, fill the body and crop with bread dressing, sew it up, and spread butter over the breast. Cover the breast with thin slices of larding pork; bend the wings backward, put skewers through the thigh and body, and place it in a roasting pan. Set the pan in a medium-hot oven and roast until the chicken has become a fine brown all over, basting frequently with its own gravy; then add cupful boiling water; continue the roasting and basting till the chicken is done, which will take from one to two hours, according to the age of the fowl. If the gravy gets too brown, add a little more water. The chicken feet, neck, and giblets may be used to make rice soup. Shortly before serving, lay the chicken on a dish, remove the skewers and thread, free the gravy from fat, mix the cornstarch with cold water, add it to the gravy, stir, and cook for a few minutes; then add sufficient boiling water to make a creamy sauce. Cook three minutes, strain, chop the boiled giblets fine and add to the sauce. Bread Dressing. pound stale bread, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, tablespoonfuls chopped onion, 1 teaspoonful salt, ½ teaspoonful pepper, 1 teaspoonful thyme, 1 egg.
Soak bread in cold water, place a saucepan with butter and onions over the fire; cook five minutes without browning; inclose the bread in a towel and press out all the water, add it to the saucepan, stir over the fire five minutes, then remove; when cold, add salt, pepper, thyme, and egg; mix well and use as stuffing.
Roast Duck.
Pick, singe, and wipe outside of duck. Salt and pepper the inside after carefully drawing and wiping.
Cut off the wings at the second point and truss the duck neatly. Roast in a very hot oven from one and a half to two hours in a baking pan containing a little water; baste frequently. Celery, onions, or apples, cored and quartered, are sometimes placed inside the duck to improve the flavor.
Two straightforward roasts, but the printed measurements have lost several fractions in typesetting and the oven directions are given only as heat words. Read the doneness note first.
- Missing fractionsThe text reads "cupful boiling water," "pound stale bread" and "tablespoonfuls chopped onion" where the original almost certainly printed ½ or ¼. Treat these as ambiguous: about ½ cup water for the pan, ½ lb stale bread and 2 tablespoons onion give proportions that work, but the book as printed does not say so.
- Oven heatThe book gives only heat words, never temperatures. "Medium-hot" is usually read as somewhere around 375-400F and "very hot" as 450F or above; at 1½ to 2 hours that heat would likely scorch a modern duck, and a common modern approach is to start hot for about 20 minutes and drop to 325-350F for the remainder.
- Doneness, not clock timeThe one-to-two-hour range reflects birds of wildly different ages. A 4 lb supermarket chicken is done in about 1½ hours at 375F; go by 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, and 165F in the centre of the stuffing as well, since the dressing contains raw egg.
- Larding porkThis is fresh pork fatback or lightly salted side pork, sliced thin and laid over the breast as a self-baster. Thin-cut unsmoked bacon or salt pork blanched briefly to draw out salt does the same job.
- Singeing and the cropSingeing burned off residual pinfeathers on a bird plucked at home; a modern chicken needs no more than a check for feather stubs. The "crop" cavity is the pocket of loose skin at the neck end, which was stuffed as well as the body. Sewing it shut is optional if you tuck the flap under the wings.
- Skewers and trussingMetal skewers through thigh and body hold the legs against the breast so the bird cooks evenly. Kitchen twine does the same and is easier to remove at the table.
- Basting and the gravyFrequent basting does little for crisp skin but does keep the pan drippings from burning, which is the real point of the added boiling water. For the sauce, slake the cornstarch in cold water before it goes near the hot liquid or it will lump.
- Duck fat and skinThe book puts water in the pan and nothing else. Pricking the skin over the breast and thighs before roasting, and pouring off the rendered fat once or twice, gives a far better result and saves excellent cooking fat.
- YieldA 4 lb chicken with dressing serves four; a duck of ordinary market size serves two to three, since the carcass is heavy relative to its meat.
Roast fowl with bread dressing is the plain centre of the Anglo-American Sunday table, and the details here place the recipe firmly in the era of the coal or wood range: singeing pinfeathers, stuffing both body and crop, and covering the breast with strips of pork fat because ovens gave uneven, drying heat and a lean bird would otherwise toughen before it browned. Chickens of the period were dual-purpose birds killed at various ages, which is why the timing is given as "one to two hours, according to the age of the fowl" rather than by weight - the pliability of the breastbone was a standard period test of a bird's age. The instruction to save feet, neck and giblets for rice soup, and to chop the boiled giblets into the sauce, reflects a household economy in which a whole bird arrived intact and nothing was discarded. The compressed, telegraphic style assumes a reader who already knew how to roast and needed only proportions and a reminder of order.