Boiled Chicken
Clean, stuff, truss, and wrap chicken in cheese cloth; cover with boiling water, and cook until tender, below the boiling point. Serve on hot platter, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and garnish with oyster sauce.
Allow twenty minutes to the pound for cooking.
A poached bird, not a boiled one — the instruction "below the boiling point" is the whole technique. Everything else follows from it.
- Hold the water at 175–180°FA genuine boil tightens and shreds the breast meat and clouds the broth. Keep the surface barely trembling, with the occasional bubble breaking, for the length of the cooking.
- Twenty minutes to the pound is generousTwenty minutes to the pound is the old rule -- on a big bird it will overshoot. Cook to temperature instead: 165°F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. A 4 lb chicken often gets there in about an hour and a quarter at poaching heat, a little under the old rule's eighty minutes.
- The stuffingA stuffed bird cooks unevenly and the centre of the dressing must also reach 165°F, which can mean overcooking the breast. Cooking the dressing separately and serving it alongside gives a better result and avoids the problem entirely.
- Cheesecloth wrapThe cloth holds the trussing and the skin in place and lets you lift the bird out whole without tearing it. Wrap loosely and leave long ends to use as handles, or set the wrapped bird on a folded strip of cloth in the pot.
- "Oyster sauce" means something else hereNot the bottled Chinese condiment. In an American book of this period it is a white sauce — butter, flour, milk or some of the poaching liquor — with shucked oysters and their liquor stirred in at the end.
- Oysters need two minutes, not fifteenOysters need only a minute or two -- Add them to the finished sauce off the direct heat and let them just plump and curl at the edges. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery.
- Keep the brothThe poaching liquid is the byproduct that makes the dish worth the trouble. Strain it, chill it, lift the fat, and use it for soup or for the sauce itself.
- YieldA 4–5 lb chicken serves four to six, depending on whether the dressing is served with it.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and published in 1907 — a promotional cookbook of the sort chocolate, flour and baking powder companies issued in that era, which is why a general meats chapter sits alongside pages of cocoa work. Boiled fowl was the usual treatment for an older, tougher bird, and the instruction to cook below boiling is a point the better nineteenth-century writers repeated often. Oyster sauce as an accompaniment to poached chicken or turkey was common in New England, oysters being cheap and plentiful on the Atlantic coast for much of the period, and the pairing turns up in printed holiday menus of the day.