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Boston Baked Chicken
Mrs. P. G. Osborn.
Cut a chicken into small pieces as for stewing. Wash and wipe dry; sprinkle with salt and dip each piece into melted butter, then coat with flour. Put into a bean pot, laying the larger pieces in the bottom of the pot and putting any pieces of chicken fat on top. Pour over it 1½ C boiling water and cover tightly. If the chicken is a young one bake it for 1½ hours. The juices, fat and flour will make an excellent gravy. Take out the chicken when done and arrange with the gravy on a dish or serve direct from the beanpot, first seasoning to taste. Mrs. A. M. Lovell.
A plain oven-braise done in a covered stoneware bean pot, where the flour coating on the chicken thickens the liquid into gravy without a separate roux. Two of the numbers in this entry have lost their fractions, so treat both the water quantity and the baking time as needing judgment rather than following them literally.
- The hinge: a tight lid and very little waterThis is a braise, not a stew. The liquid should come nowhere near covering the chicken; a half cup or so is enough to start the steam, and the flour and rendered fat do the rest. Too much water and you get thin broth instead of gravy.
- The bean potA narrow-mouthed glazed stoneware pot with a lid, the same vessel used for Boston baked beans. Any heavy covered casserole or Dutch oven of similar size works; if the lid is loose, lay foil under it so steam does not escape.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A slow-to-moderate oven, about 325 to 350F, suits the method; at that heat a cut-up bird in a covered pot takes roughly an hour and a half to two hours, not the figure printed here, which appears to have lost part of a fraction.
- DonenessJudge by the meat, not the clock: thigh joints should read 175F and pull easily from the bone, breast pieces 165F. Bone-in dark meat benefits from going past the minimum in a moist covered pot.
- A young onePeriod cooks distinguished a young broiler or fryer from an older stewing hen, which needed hours of moist heat. A supermarket chicken of 3 1/2 to 4 lb is a young one by this standard.
- Chicken fat on topOlder birds came with loose abdominal fat that was saved and used. Modern birds carry little; a tablespoon or two of extra butter over the top pieces serves the same purpose of basting them as it melts.
- Finishing the gravySkim the fat from the pot liquid before seasoning. If it is thinner than you want, reduce it briefly in a saucepan rather than adding more flour, which will taste raw.
- YieldOne chicken cut for stewing serves four at luncheon, or three generously with the gravy over rice, potatoes or toast.
Church and society cook books of this period are full of dishes named for cities, and "Boston" here may well signal the vessel rather than the seasoning: the bean pot was a common piece of kitchen stoneware, kept for the Saturday night beans that New England habit had spread across the whole country. Using it for chicken is an economy of equipment as much as of fuel, since a tightly covered pot in a slow oven needed no watching and no basting, and could share the oven with bread or a pudding. The Libertyville book, like most compiled congregational collections, credits contributors by married name and prints their recipes as they were handed in, which is why the same dish can arrive with more than one name attached to it.