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Experiments Tried on Friends: Mister
We cut off the neck bone, but not the skin, even with the wings, then held the bird under the cold-water faucet for just a moment and wiped it off, inside and out, with a soft paper towel. The stuffing, wherein lay the experiment for me - my "trick on Mister Chickie" - consisted of the following: 3 cupfuls soft bread crumbs 1/2 cupful peanut butter 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful paprika 1 egg, lightly beaten 1/4 cupful liquid, stock or water This was all mixed together and stuffed into the chicken until it resumed its normal shape. With the kitchenette darning needle and a bit of white twine, a few stitches were taken to close the cavity, so that the dressing would not cook out in the oven. We folded forward the neck skin, folded back the wings and tied them securely down with a cord, and inserted a few pieces of salt pork over the breast of the chicken, fastening them under the neck skin with the darning needle itself.
The legs were pulled back close to the body t Experiments Tried on Friends and tied securely by drawing another cord around the body of the bird.
Mister Chickie, on a rack, not on the bottom of the roasting pan, then took his stand in the center of a hot oven for fifteen minutes. During this time he was turned so as to become evenly browned on all sides.
At the end of fifteen minutes a cup of hot water was put into the pan, and with a long-handled spoon was poured all over the chicken. After each moistening, or, as it is called, basting, we dredged it lightly with flour. A teaspoonful of salt was added after the dredging, and the gas flame of the oven was turned down so that the chicken would continue to cook at a lower temperature for an hour and a half in order to be thoroughly done yet tender.
Every ten minutes or so we basted and dredged it and added our pared potatoes and the giblets to the pan to cook three quarters of an hour before serving.
When all else was on the table, out of the oven came Mister Chickie, as plump, shiny, and brown as any one would wish to see. All cords and threads and the darning needle were carefully removed, lest our carver should encounter them in his carving.
The greater part of the fat left in the roasting pan was poured off for future use, while the pan with the gravy was returned to the fire and the minced giblets and two tablespoonfuls of flour and half a teaspoonful of salt were stirred into it. Half a cupful of milk was added, and it was allowed to boil up for two minutes and poured into the gravy bowl. The rest there were only bones left to tell the tale. A SUNDAY DINNER FOR FRIENDS They said they liked this dinner, these two guests of mine, and they certainly didn't do any perfunctory nibbling. To Experiments Tried on Friends be served lamb, though, on a Sunday and when one is a guest, must have been somewhat of a shock. I was a little dubious myself, for he was a traveling man used to hotel service, and she hadn't kept house for nearly four years, but was regularly eating where dinners cost seventyfive cents a cover. A peculiar circumstance made me venture to invite them. He had declared that ten years hence no woman would cook they would all consider it beneath them; and I wanted him to see my playthings that made me contradict his prophecy with a "You just wait until we women have our kitchens fitted up as conveniently for work as you men have your offices, and see if we don't love to cook." I couldn't resist showing off my pet, the large pressure cooker (I am charging up to entertainment the greater part of the fourteen dollars paid for it), so instead of roasting my stuffed breast of lamb for an hour and a quarter in the oven, I roasted it à la the cooker.
The meat I had was but two pounds of a breast of lamb. By cutting between the bones and flesh a pocket was made which was stuffed with slices of tart apples sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. With my kitchen darning needle I caught together the edges with a few stitches and browned the roll in butter for five minutes in the bottom of the cooker placed directly over the flame, then lifted it up by means of the double fork or "crab" in order to insert a wire rack for it to rest upon during the remainder of the cooking. The meat was seasoned with salt and pepper, four washed and brushed potatoes were laid in beside it, and a cup of hot water poured into the kettle.
The cover clamped on, the heat was turned on for eight minutes until the Experiments Tried on Friends pressure gauge told us - both Mr. and Mrs. Guest were watching with interest now - that the lamb was being cooked in steam at twenty pounds' pressure. The flame was lowered to keep this temperature for ten minutes; it was only out of respect for the lamb that I didn't let the pressure go up to thirty pounds, when the safety valve would exhaust with a shrill whistle, for the fun of startling my guests.
I let the kettle do it once when cooking macaroni and had to call my dish macaroni à la Du Pont, for each little macaroni stick exploded.
At the end of ten minutes of cooking under twenty pounds' pressure, I turned off the gas, allowed it to cool for five minutes until the pressure was down to zero, then carried the cooker to the open window and turned the exhaust valve, letting all the unpleasant lamby smell pass off with the steam to the outside air.
While the cooker was taking care of the lamb, the macaroni was cooked, salad made, and coffee put on to percolate. In just one hour to the minute we sat down to the following dinner:
Menu Stuffed Breast of Lamb Potatoes in Skins Bread and Butter Macaroni and Tomatoes Celery String Bean Salad Pineapple and Raisin Whip Chocolate Cake Coffee Stuffed Breast of Lamb 2 pounds breast of lamb 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tart apples 1 tablespoonful salt teaspoonful pepper Cinnamon Cut a pocket in the lamb between the bones and flesh. Stuff with sliced apples, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Put into a hot oven. At the end of ten minutes lower the heat, season, and cook for an hour and a quarter. *
Two dishes are buried in this chatty account: a roast chicken with peanut-butter stuffing, and a breast of lamb stuffed with apple and cooked either in the oven or under pressure. The transcription has dropped several fractions, so read the stuffing quantities with care.
- Missing fractionsThe stuffing list reads "cupful peanut butter" and "cupful liquid" with no number in front. In the original printing these were almost certainly fractions, and against 3 cups of crumbs and one egg, half a cup of each gives a stuffing that holds together without being greasy. Treat the amounts as genuinely uncertain and adjust by feel.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no figures. A "hot oven" of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F for the initial fifteen minutes, and "turned down so that the chicken would continue to cook at a lower temperature" suggests roughly 325-350F for the remainder.
- Roasting timeAn hour and a half at reduced heat after the sear suits a bird of about 4-5 lb. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh rather than by the clock; birds today are often heavier than the ones this writer bought.
- Stuffed birdsA stuffing bound with egg and sewn into the cavity must itself reach 165F, and it heats more slowly than the meat. Check the centre of the stuffing with a thermometer, or bake it alongside in a dish.
- Salt pork and dredgingThe salt pork laid over the breast is barding; sliced fatty bacon or a sheet of pork fat does the same job. The repeated basting and flour dredging builds a thick, matte brown crust rather than the glossy skin modern roasting aims at, and it is what makes the pan drippings thicken so readily for the gravy.
- The darning needleA trussing needle and butcher's twine replace the "kitchenette darning needle" and white twine. The author's warning about removing the needle before carving is not a joke; count everything out that went in.
- Pressure cooker pressureThe lamb is cooked at 20 lb of steam pressure, with talk of running it to 30. Modern domestic stovetop cookers are generally built for a maximum of about 15 psi, and many electric models run lower still, around 10-12 psi; their safety systems are designed around those figures. Use your cooker's own high setting and its manufacturer's timing for a stuffed 2 lb lamb breast; do not try to reproduce the numbers given here.
- The oven version of the lambThe written-out recipe at the end is the simpler route: ten minutes in a hot oven, which would be somewhere around 425F, then reduced to perhaps 325F for an hour and a quarter; no temperatures are given in the book. One tablespoon of salt for 2 lb of meat is heavy by current taste; a teaspoon and a half is nearer the mark.
- YieldThe chicken with its stuffing and pan potatoes would serve about four, though the recipe never gives the bird's weight. The 2 lb lamb breast, which is a bony cut, stretched to three at this table and would serve two generously.
Kitchenette cookery belongs to the wave of books written for the small apartment kitchens that spread through American cities in the 1910s and 1920s, where a cook had a two-burner gas plate, a shallow oven and no pantry. The peanut butter stuffing is a period marker: peanut butter had moved within a couple of decades from sanitarium health food to grocery staple, and cookbook writers of these years worked it into soups, sandwiches, loaves and dressings with an enthusiasm that later cooks did not sustain. So is the pressure cooker, which the author charges up at fourteen dollars and shows off to her guests like a new automobile; domestic pressure cooking was still novel enough in the interwar years to count as entertainment, and her aside about the safety valve whistling and the macaroni exploding is a fair picture of how unfamiliar the equipment was. The framing argument with her male guest, who predicts that within ten years no woman will cook, is the book's real thesis in miniature: give the kitchen the fittings of an office and the work becomes worth doing.