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Chickens, German Mode of Cooking
INGREDIENTS. -2 chickens, lardoons, French rolls, 3 oz. of butter, breadcrumbs, 1 onion, 1 egg, parsley and thyme, grated lemon-peel, a small cup of cream.
AVERAGE COST, 58.
Stuff the chickens with a forcemeat made of French rolls, a little butter, egg, finely chopped onion, parsley, thyme and grated lemon-peel; then lard and bread-crumb them, putting a piece of fat over the breasts that they may not become too brown. Place them in a stewpan with 1 oz. of butter, leave uncovered for a short time, then cover and bake for 1½ hour. Half an hour before serving, add the cream and baste thoroughly over a hotter fire.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Chicken (or Fowl) Patties. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS.-The remains of cold roast chicken or fowl; to every 1/4 lb. of meat allow 2 oz. of ham, 3 tablespoonfuls of cream, 2 tablespoonfuls of veal gravy, ½ teaspoonful of minced lemonpeel; cayenne, salt and pepper to taste; 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 1 oz. of butter rolled in flour, puff paste.
Mince very small the white meat from a cold roast fowl, after removing all the skin; weigh it, and to every 1/4 lb. of meat allow the above proportion of minced ham. Put CHICKEN PATTIES. these into a stewpan with the remaining ingredients, stir over the fire for 10 minutes or 1/4 hour, taking care that the mixture does not burn. Roll out some puff paste about 1/4 inch in thickness, line the pattypans with this, put upon each a small piece of bread, and cover with another layer of paste; brush over with the yolk of an egg, and bake in a brisk oven for about 1/4 CHICKEN, POTTED. hour. When done, cut a round piece out of the top, and, with a small spoon, take out the bread (be particular in not breaking the outside border of the crust), and fill the patties with the mixture.
TIME. hour to prepare the meat; not quite 1/4 hour to bake the crust.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Chicken (or Fowl) Pie. INGREDIENTS for large pie.-2 small fowls or 1 large one, white pepper and salt to taste, ½ teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, ½ teaspoonful of pounded mace, forcemeat, a few slices of ham, 3 hard-boiled eggs, 1/2 pint of water, puff crust. AVERAGE COST, 5s. 6d.
Skin and cut up the fowls into joints, and put the necks, legs and backbones in a stewpan, with a little water, an onion, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a blade of mace; let these stew for about an hour, and, when done, strain off the liquor this is for gravy. Put a layer of fowl at the bottom of a pie-dish, then a layer of ham, then one of forcemeat and hard-boiled eggs cut in rings; between the layers put a seasoning of pounded mace, nutmeg, pepper and salt. Proceed in this manner until the dish is full, and pour in about 1/21 pint of water; border the edge of the dish with puff crust, put on the cover, ornament the top, and glaze it by brushing over it the yolk of an egg. Bake from 1 to 1½ hour, should the pie be very large, and, when done, pour in at the top the gravy made from the bones. If to be eaten cold, and wished particularly nice, the joints of the fowls should be boned, and placed in the dish with alternate layers of forcemeat; sausage-meat may also be substituted for the forcemeat, and is now very much used.
When the chickens are boned, and mixed with sausage-meat, the pie will take about 2 hours to bake. It should be covered with a piece of paper when about half done, to prevent the paste being dried up or scorched.
TIME. For a pie with unboned meat, 14 to 1 hour; with boned meat and sausage or forcemeat, 1 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Chicken, Potted. (A Luncheon or Breakfast Dish.) - INGREDIENTS. The remains of cold roast chicken; to every lb. of meat allow 1/4 lb. of fresh butter, salt and cayenne to taste, 1 teaspoonful of pounded mace, 1/2 small nutmeg.
Strip the meat from the bones of cold roast fowl; when it is freed from gristle and skin, weigh it. and to every lb. of meat allow the above proportion of butter, sea- CHICKEN SALAD. soning, and spices. Cut the meat into small pieces, pound it well with the fresh butter, sprinkle in the spices gradually, and keep pounding until reduced to a perfectly smooth paste. Put it into pottingpots for use, and cover it with clarified butter, about 1/4 inch in thickness, and, if to be kept for some time, tie over a bladder: 2 or 3 slices of ham, minced and pounded with the above ingredients, will be found an improvement. It should be kept in a dry place.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Four chicken recipes run together here, the German roast being the headline. Beeton's oven language and her habit of giving contradictory times in the body and the TIME line both need translating.
- The times contradict each otherThe method says bake 1½ hours; the TIME line says 1 hour. For two chickens in a covered stewpan in a 350F oven, judge by the thigh reading 165F rather than by either figure. The last half hour, when the cream goes in and the birds are basted over a hotter fire, falls within the bake and is largely a browning and reducing stage.
- Lardoons and the fat over the breastLardoons are thin strips of pork fat or fatback drawn through the flesh with a larding needle; the 'piece of fat over the breasts' is unspecified, most likely a sheet of back fat or caul. Modern equivalents are streaky bacon laid over the breast, or simply butter under the skin. Both exist because Victorian fowls were generally leaner and drier than a supermarket chicken.
- French rollsA soft white bread roll, used here for the stuffing base. Crumble the interior of two or three stale rolls, or substitute fresh white breadcrumbs, bound with the egg, softened butter, onion, herbs and lemon zest.
- Oven settings'A brisk oven' for the patty cases is usually taken as 425-450F. The German chicken is baked covered under fat to keep the birds pale, so a moderate oven of about 350F suits the main bake, with the heat raised for the final half hour as the recipe directs.
- The blind-baked patty casesThe small piece of bread between the two rounds of puff paste is a filler that holds the lid up and is dug out after baking — a Victorian alternative to baking beans. A modern cook can use the same trick or bake vol-au-vent cases in the usual way.
- Do not overcook the patty fillingTen to fifteen minutes of stirring is for cold cooked chicken and ham that only need heating through in the cream and gravy; the meat is already cooked and will turn stringy if pushed. Keep the heat low so the cream does not split, and add the lemon juice at the end.
- Veal gravyA reduced veal stock, a common standby in better-equipped Victorian kitchens. Use a good chicken or veal stock reduced until slightly syrupy; a light commercial demi-glace works.
- Potted chicken: butter seal and bladderThe clarified butter and the pig's bladder tied over the top were the period's method of excluding air for weeks of ambient storage. That is exactly the low-acid, oxygen-free, room-temperature condition that modern food safety rules out for cooked meat, and no quantity or temperature here controls for it. Treat the pounding method as historically interesting, and follow a current recipe if you intend to keep potted meat at all.
- Costs and yield'Average cost 5s' is mid-Victorian retail and has no modern meaning. No yields are given here; two chickens would plausibly serve six to eight, and the large pie, built with ham, forcemeat and eggs, eight or more.
Beeton's "German mode" belongs to a long English habit of tagging a dish with a nationality to signal a single distinguishing feature — here the larding, the crumb coating and the cream finish, which together read as a north European braised-roast fowl rather than the plain English roast with bread sauce. The neighbouring entries suggest one way a chicken might be used up: the bird was roasted, then the carcass was stewed for gravy and the picked meat went into patties, a pie or a potting pot. Potting, in which cooked meat was pounded to a paste with butter, spiced heavily with mace and nutmeg and sealed under a layer of clarified butter, was one of the standard British preservation methods before domestic refrigeration, and the bladder tied over the jar was the ordinary closure of the day. The heavy hand with mace and nutmeg in all four recipes is characteristic of English cookery of the period, which kept a taste for warm spices in savoury meat.