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Braised Chicken
Braised chicken is generally a fowl.
Wipe, stuff, sew, skewer, and place on rack in kettle with tight-fitting cover.
Place six slices of salt pork on bottom of kettle, add one fourth cup each, carrot, onion, turnip, and celery, bit of bay leaf, sprig of parsley, one teaspoon peppercorns, two teaspoons salt, and three cups boiling water.
Cover kettle, and cook in oven three to four hours, always keeping enough water in kettle to prevent vegetables from burning. When tender, brush over with melted butter, dredge with flour, and brown in oven.
Serve with gravy and vegetables pressed through sieve. Garnish with parsley.
A pot-roasted stewing hen, browned at the end for color. The method is sound; only the bird and the oven need translating.
- "A fowl"In 1907 this meant a mature laying hen of 4-6 lb, tough enough to want three or four hours of moist heat. A modern broiler-fryer of the same weight will be falling apart in half that time; if you can find a stewing hen or an older heritage bird, use it and keep the long time.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Braise at 325F, which keeps the liquid at a bare simmer for the whole time. The final browning wants 450F for 15-20 minutes, watched, since flour-dredged butter goes from gold to bitter quickly.
- The rack mattersThe bird sits above the liquid, not in it, so the lower half steams while the top stays dry. Without a rack you are making boiled fowl. Any trivet or a bed of thick vegetable slices will do.
- Salt porkSix slices of salt pork is roughly 4-6 oz, cut about a quarter inch thick. Unsmoked pork belly or thick-cut bacon substitutes, but rinse salt pork first and then judge the two teaspoons of salt against your own taste.
- VegetablesA quarter cup each means diced small, not the large chunks of a modern pot roast; they are there for the gravy, not the plate. "Turnip" in New England cookbooks of this period often means rutabaga.
- DonenessJudge by the thigh, not the clock: 175-180F at the joint and the drumstick loose in its socket. An old hen can need well past four hours; a young bird will be there by two.
- The sieved gravyThe sieved vegetables -- Pressing the braising vegetables through a sieve will enrich and thicken the sauce, though the original's wording may equally mean the sieved vegetables were served alongside the gravy. Either way, skim the fat first or it will be greasy, and reduce the strained liquid if it seems thin rather than adding more flour.
- YieldA 5 lb bird with stuffing serves six. The stuffing is left to another page of the book; any bread stuffing suits, and it should be packed loosely since it will steam rather than roast.
Braising - slow cooking in a covered vessel with a little liquid, the heat coming from all sides - was the standard American treatment for a hen past her laying years, and cookbooks of this era distinguished carefully between the "fowl" you braised or stewed and the young "chicken" you broiled or fried. The distinction mattered because a hen that had spent two or three years in the yard had connective tissue no dry heat could redeem. Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and written by Maria Willett Howard, a graduate of the Boston Cooking School; the chocolate recipes were the point of the exercise, but the book is a full general cookbook in the Fannie Farmer mold, and its meat chapter reflects that school's habit of specifying an exact list of aromatics rather than leaving the pot to the cook's judgment. The final buttering, dredging and browning is the period's answer to a problem braising still has: a bird cooked under a lid looks pale and unappetizing, whatever it tastes like.