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To Dress Chickens with Tomatoes
Fry till a light brown. Then add some tomatoes, cut in small pieces, with the juice. Strain the tomatoes from the seed, season them with salt, pepper, a little sugar, and let them stew.--Mrs. J. B. D.
Like most of the contributed recipes in this book, this one assumes you already know how to fry a chicken and tells you only the part that makes the dish distinctive. What follows fills in the assumptions.
- The hinge: it is a braise, not a fryThe browning is only the first stage; the chicken finishes cooking in the tomatoes, which is what makes the dish. Get real colour on the pieces first, then let them stew in the tomato until the meat pulls easily from the bone, roughly 30-40 minutes for a cut-up bird.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For one chicken of 3-4 lb, cut into eight or ten pieces, allow about 2 lb of ripe tomatoes or one 28-oz can, a teaspoon of salt, and no more than a teaspoon of sugar.
- Chicken of the periodA 19th-century frying chicken was a young bird of perhaps 2 lb, leaner and tougher than a supermarket broiler. A modern 3-4 lb chicken cut into serving pieces works; thighs and drumsticks alone hold up best to the stewing.
- How to fry itFried chicken recipes elsewhere in this book generally dredge the pieces in seasoned flour and fry them in lard or bacon fat in an iron skillet. If you flour the chicken, what is left in the pan will help thicken the tomato as it stews.
- Straining the seedsChopping the tomatoes and then straining them from the seed means pressing the pulp and juice through a sieve or colander, discarding seeds and skin. Passata is already the strained product; canned crushed or whole tomatoes still carry their seeds, so sieve them if you want to follow the instruction as written.
- The sugarProbably there to offset acidity rather than to sweeten. The recipe adds it along with the salt and pepper before the stewing, so use a light hand and leave it out if the tomatoes are ripe and sweet.
- DonenessCook until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165F. The sauce should have reduced to a loose, glossy consistency that coats the chicken rather than a thin broth.
- YieldOne chicken serves four. Rice, hominy or biscuit to catch the sauce is the period-appropriate accompaniment.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered recipes from a wide circle of Virginia housekeepers and printed them under their contributors' initials, which is why this one closes with "Mrs. J. B. D." rather than a name. The brevity is characteristic: the recipe tells the reader only what is different about this version. Tomatoes were the new element. By the time this book appeared they were thoroughly ordinary, and cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s are full of tomatoes stewed, scalloped, baked and used as a sauce for meat. Chicken browned and then finished in tomato is a treatment found across the Mediterranean and in French cookery as well, but nothing here suggests borrowing; it reads as a home cook's use of an abundant late-summer crop with the bird she already had in the pan.