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Roast Chicken with Chestnut Stuffing
Dress, clean, stuff and truss a four-pound chicken. Rub with salt and pepper, and place in roasting pan. Cover breast and legs with paste made by rubbing together 3 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour. Dredge bottom pan with flour. Place chicken in hot oven (550 degrees F.) to sear. Baste with 1/4 cup butter or bacon fat melted in 1/2 cup boiling water. Reduce heat of oven to 400 degrees, continue baking, and baste every ten minutes until tender. If water dries from pan, add more. Takes about 1 1/4 hours to roast 4-lb. chicken.
Gravy: Pour off liquid from pan in which chicken was roasted. Let it settle, remove 4 tablespoons of the chicken fat and place back in pan. Heat, and add four tablespoons flour. When browned together, add slowly 2 cups broth in which giblets were cooked, season with salt, pepper and paprika. Chop giblets very fine and add to gravy. Serves 6.
A straightforward high-heat roast that relies on a flour-and-butter paste to protect the breast, with the pan drippings turned into a giblet gravy. A few of its numbers need translating for a modern range and a modern bird.
- The searing oven550F is at or above the top of most home ovens, and many will not hold it with the door being opened. Preheat as high as the oven goes, sear 15-20 minutes, then drop to 400F as written. Expect smoke from the dredged flour in the pan bottom, and run the extractor.
- Doneness, not clockAn hour and a quarter for four pounds is roughly right at these temperatures, but a stuffed bird runs longer. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh away from bone, and 165F at the centre of the stuffing; stuffing is the part that lags.
- "Dress and clean"This assumed a bird arriving with head, feet and innards. A supermarket chicken needs only the giblet packet removed and the cavity patted dry; current advice is not to rinse raw poultry, since it spatters bacteria around the sink. Dry skin is what makes the paste crisp rather than steam.
- The butter-flour pasteThree tablespoons butter rubbed into two of flour is a beurre manié smeared over breast and legs. It sets into a shield that keeps the breast from drying at high heat and browns to a crust. Have the butter soft, not melted, or it will slide off in the first ten minutes.
- Basting liquidA quarter cup of fat melted into half a cup of boiling water gives a fat-and-water baste that separates in the pan and needs stirring or spooning up as you go. Keep a little water in the pan throughout, as instructed, or the flour dredge scorches and the gravy turns bitter.
- Giblets and brothThe gravy needs two cups of giblet broth, which the recipe never tells you to start. Simmer neck, heart and gizzard in lightly salted water with an onion for an hour while the bird roasts; add the liver only for the last ten minutes.
- The gravy rouxFour tablespoons fat to four of flour thickens two cups of broth to a proper coating gravy. Cook the roux until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut butter before the liquid goes in, and add the broth in stages, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- YieldSix servings is optimistic for a four-pound bird if the meal is not heavily stuffed and sided. Five is more comfortable, or roast two smaller birds for a company table.