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Chicken Pudding with Potatoes
Cut up a young chicken as if to fry, and parboil it. Boil and mash Irish potatoes. Beat up three or four eggs, add to the potatoes, and thin with milk. Season with butter, pepper and salt, stir in the chicken, and bake it. Boiled rice is a good substitute for potatoes.--Mrs. E. W. N. B--Most of the recipes given for turkey apply to peafowl, and most of those given for chicken may be used for guinea fowl.--Mrs. S. T.
A parboiled chicken bound in a soft potato-and-egg batter and baked -- closer to a shepherd's pie without the crust than to a pudding in the English sense. The original assumes you know how loose the potato mixture should be, which is the one thing worth getting right.
- Consistency is the hingeThin the mashed potato with milk until it pours slowly from the spoon, like a thick pancake batter. Too stiff and it bakes into a dense block; too loose and it will not set around the chicken.
- "A young chicken"A broiler of about 3 lb, cut into eight pieces as for frying. Parboil 10-15 minutes in salted water -- the pieces finish cooking in the oven, and the poaching liquid is worth keeping to thin the potatoes in place of some of the milk.
- Bone it or notThe recipe leaves the pieces on the bone, which is period-correct but awkward to serve. Pulling the meat off after parboiling makes a dish that cuts cleanly.
- "Irish potatoes"Ordinary white potatoes, as distinguished from sweet potatoes -- a distinction worth making in a Virginia kitchen where sweet potatoes were also in common use. About 2 lb, boiled and mashed.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for 40-50 minutes, until the top is set and browned and the chicken is at 165F throughout.
- Seasoning"Season with butter" means generously -- 3 to 4 tablespoons stirred into the hot potatoes. Salt with a firmer hand than feels right, since potato and egg absorb a great deal.
- The rice variantSubstituting boiled rice gives a firmer, more casserole-like result. Use rice cooked soft rather than al dente, or it will not bind with the eggs.
- YieldEnough for four to six in a 2-quart dish.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from Virginia housekeepers and signed them with initials, which is why this page carries two voices -- Mrs. E. W. N. B-- on the pudding and Mrs. S. T. adding a note on substituting fowl. "Pudding" here retains its older, broader English sense of anything bound and baked or boiled in a dish, savoury as readily as sweet; the sweet-only meaning is a later narrowing. The appended note is a good index of what a Virginia larder actually held: guinea fowl were commonly kept on farms, valued as much for raising an alarm in the yard as for the table, and a cook was expected to move between birds without needing a separate recipe for each. The dish itself belongs to a large family of Southern chicken puddings, which often use a batter of flour and eggs; here mashed potato or rice takes their place.