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Chicken Fricassee
Cut chicken in pieces for serving, season with salt and pepper, brown in butter or pork fat. When golden brown cover with boiling water; add six cloves, a bit of bay leaf, a sprig of parsley, and simmer until tender.
Melt four tablespoons butter, add four tablespoons flour, two and one half cups water in which chicken was cooked. Cook ten minutes; add one cup cream or two egg yolks. Arrange chicken on platter, pour sauce around, and garnish with toast and parsley. If a brown sauce is preferred, brown the butter and brown the flour, adding one more tablespoon.
A straightforward braise-and-velouté, and it still works as written. A few of the assumptions behind it have shifted.
- The birdA fricassee chicken of this period was often a mature fowl that needed a long simmer, sometimes well over an hour. A modern supermarket broiler-fryer will be tender in 35-45 minutes; check the thigh rather than the clock. Bone-in thighs and drumsticks hold up better than breast.
- Brown, but not too darkBrowning in butter or pork fat is for colour and flavour, not for cooking through. Work in batches so the pieces sear rather than steam, and keep the fond in the pan — the boiling water lifts it into the broth.
- Boiling water, not coldAdding boiling water is deliberate: it keeps the pan hot and the browning intact. Cold water would drop the temperature and stall the whole thing. Chicken stock in place of water is a legitimate improvement.
- Six cloves is a lotWhole cloves are much more assertive than most modern palates expect in a cream sauce. Three or four is safer, and tie them with the bay and parsley so they can be fished out.
- The rouxFour tablespoons butter to four tablespoons flour to 2½ cups liquid gives a sauce of about medium body. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding liquid, and add the broth gradually to avoid lumps. Thin with more broth if it sets too stiff.
- Egg yolksIf you use yolks rather than cream, temper them: whisk a ladle of hot sauce into the beaten yolks, return the mixture to the pan, and hold it below a simmer. Boiling after the yolks go in will curdle the sauce.
- The brown variantFor the brown version, cook the butter and flour to a nut-brown colour over moderate heat, stirring constantly — browned flour loses thickening power, which is why the recipe calls for an extra tablespoon.
- ServingA single chicken will serve roughly four. "Garnish with toast" means pieces of toast set around the platter to soak up sauce; rice or noodles do the same job.
Fricassee — from the French fricasser, generally glossed as to cut up and cook in a pan — describes a halfway house between a sauté and a stew: the meat is browned or sweated first, then simmered in liquid that becomes the sauce. Chicken fricassee was one of the most reliable ways for an American household to use a hen past her laying prime, and nineteenth-century cookbooks distinguish white fricassee (sauce finished with cream or yolks) from brown (roux cooked dark first), exactly the choice offered here. Its appearance in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook is less odd than it looks: Lowney's published general household cookbooks in the early twentieth century as advertising, filling out the meat and vegetable chapters with standard domestic-science fare alongside the recipes for their own product.