Roast Chicken
Remove pinfeathers, singe, take out tendons, draw skin back from neck, cut off neck close to body, cut out oil bag. Make an incision between the legs, running from the breastbone down, and through this opening draw the entrails.
If care is taken, all of the internal organs can be removed at once by separating the membrane inclosing the organs, from the body.
Draw windpipe and crop through the neck opening.
Never make an incision in the breast.
Wash inside of bird with cloth wrung out of cold water, removing all clots of blood. Wipe, stuff, sew up openings, truss, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, place on rack in dripping pan, and cook fifteen minutes in very hot oven. Then dredge pan with flour, reduce heat, and baste every ten minutes until chicken is done, turning often.
Allow fifteen minutes to the pound for roasting.
This is a whole-bird dressing lesson as much as a roasting recipe, written when chickens arrived with head, feet and innards attached. Most of the first half is now done for you at the counter.
- Start with the bird you can buyA supermarket chicken comes drawn, singed and free of pinfeathers and oil gland. Skip to washing the cavity — or rather, patting it dry — and go straight to seasoning. The neck, gizzard and heart in the bag inside are the makings of gravy.
- Do not rinse the birdThe instruction to wash the inside with a cold cloth belongs to an era of hand-drawn poultry. Rinsing a modern chicken splashes Salmonella and Campylobacter around the sink; dry the cavity with paper towels instead and wash your hands.
- The temperaturesThe recipe gives no figures at all. "Very hot oven" in period American cookery is usually taken as somewhere around 450-475F, and "reduce heat" as a moderate oven; a moderate setting is where the bird will spend most of its time. The initial blast sets the skin and starts the browning.
- Dredging, twiceFlouring the bird and then the hot pan is an old browning-and-thickening trick: the pan flour toasts in the drippings and gives the gravy its colour and body. It works, but it also smokes if the pan runs dry, so keep a little water or stock in the bottom.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundThat gives about 75 minutes for a 5 lb bird, which is in the right neighbourhood but should not be trusted alone. Roast to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, clear of bone; a stuffed bird needs the centre of the stuffing at 165F too, which usually adds 20-30 minutes.
- Turning oftenThe recipe says to turn the bird often, plausibly a hedge against the uneven heat of a coal or early gas oven. In a modern oven, breast-up the whole way, or breast-down for the first half hour and then flipped, will do; constant turning tears the skin.
- Resting and yieldThe original says nothing about resting. Give the bird 15 minutes loosely tented before carving. A 4-5 lb chicken with stuffing serves four to six.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of a long line of cookbooks published to put a brand's name in the kitchen, with chocolate recipes threaded through an otherwise general household manual. That a chapter on meats opens by teaching a cook to singe, draw and truss a fowl says a good deal about the period: poultry was still commonly bought whole and undressed, and the dressing was the housewife's or cook's job. The insistence on never cutting the breast and on drawing the crop through the neck keeps the breast whole for the table, and instructions of this kind are common across American cookery books of the 1890s and 1900s, Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School volumes among them.