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Choosing and Trussing (Fowls for boiling it should be)
In choosing fowls for boiling, it should be borne in mind that those which are not black-legged are generally much whiter when dressed.
Pick, draw, singe, wash and truss them in the following manner, without the livers in the wings; and, in drawing, be careful not to break the gall-bladder. Cut off the neck, leaving sufficient skin to skewer back. Cut the feet off to the first joint, tuck the stumps into a slit made on each side of the belly, twist the wings over the back of the fowl, and secure the top of the leg and the bottom of the wing together by running a skewer through them and the body. The other side must be done in the same manner. Should the fowl be very large and old, draw the sinews of the legs before tucking them in. Make a slit in the apron of the fowl, large enough to admit the parson's nose, and tie a string on the tops of the legs to keep them in their proper place.
When they are firmly trussed, put them into a stewpan with plenty of hot water, bring it to boil, and carefully remove all the scum as it rises. Simmer very gently until the fowl is tender, and bear in mind that the slower it boils the plumper and whiter will the fowl be. Many cooks wrap them in a floured cloth to preserve the colour, and to prevent the scum from clinging to them; in this case, a few slices of lemon should be placed on the breasts, over these a sheet of buttered paper, and then the cloth; cooking them in this manner renders the flesh very white. Boiled ham, bacon, boiled tongue, or pickled pork, are the usual accompaniments to boiled fowls, and they may be served with Béchamel, white sauce, parsley and butter, oyster, CHICKEN, CHAUDFROID OF. lemon, liver, celery or mushroom sauce.
A little should be poured over the fowls after the skewers are removed, and the remainder sent in a tureen to table.
TIME.-Large fowl, 1 hour; moderatesized one, 3/4 hour; chicken, from 20 minutes to hour.
SEASONABLE all the year, but scarce in early spring.
This is a trussing-and-poaching method rather than a dish with a fixed ingredient list, and most of the work is in the preparation. Two things carry over intact: keep the water at a bare simmer, and buy a bird suited to the method.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it at a bare simmer -- the recipe brings the water to the boil once, then asks you to simmer very gently, and says outright that the slower it boils the plumper and whiter the fowl. The water should shiver rather than bubble; the book gives no temperature, though the usual modern gloss for a bare simmer is somewhere around 180-190F. A rolling boil tightens and splits the breast muscle and drives scum onto the skin, which is exactly what the floured cloth is there to prevent.
- What a "fowl" wasA boiling fowl was a retired laying hen, tough, fatty and full of flavour, and it wanted long gentle cooking. A supermarket chicken is a young bird of 3-4 lb; treat it as the "moderate-sized one" or chicken in the timings, not the large fowl. If you can find a genuine boiling fowl from a butcher, expect 1.5 to 2 hours.
- The timings, and the gap in themThe text has been damaged in transmission: "from 20 minutes to hour" is missing a fraction (almost certainly half an hour), though "3/4 hour" is intact. Rather than the clock, use a thermometer: 165F/74C in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. A 3.5 lb chicken poached gently reaches that in roughly 50-60 minutes.
- Buying instead of dressingPicking, drawing and singeing assume a bird bought with feathers and innards in place. Buy it oven-ready and you skip to trussing. The warning about the gall-bladder still matters if you ever draw a bird yourself: a broken gall bladder stains the flesh bitter and green and no rinsing fixes it.
- Trussing termsThe "apron" is the flap of skin and fat at the vent; the "parson's nose" is the fatty tail knob, tucked through the slit to close the cavity. "Drawing the sinews" means severing the tendons in the drumstick of an old bird so the legs can be folded without springing back. Two long metal skewers and a length of butcher's twine do the whole job.
- VesselsA "stewpan" here is simply a deep lidded pot large enough for the bird with a couple of inches of water above it. "Plenty of hot water" means enough to cover; no salt is mentioned, though the broth is much better for an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and a little salt.
- The floured clothMuslin or a clean tea towel dusted with flour, lemon slices on the breast, buttered paper over them. It works — the flour sets into a skin that catches scum and the lemon keeps the flesh pale. It is worth the trouble only if whiteness matters to you visually; the flavour gain is negligible.
- A stray line"CHICKEN, CHAUDFROID OF." in the middle of the sauce list is a cross-reference from the original dictionary-style layout that has slipped into the sentence. It is not an ingredient.
- Yield and the brothA 3.5 lb bird serves four with a sauce and one of the salt-meat accompaniments. Do not discard the poaching liquid: reduce it and it becomes the base for the béchamel or parsley sauce the recipe calls for.
Boiled fowl with ham or tongue was a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian middle-class table, and its logic is economic as much as culinary — a hen past laying was too tough to roast, and long slow poaching was the only way to make her tender while yielding a useful broth at the same time. The insistence on whiteness runs through the whole period: pale flesh, pale sauce, pale garnish, with the pink salt meat set beside it for contrast, and the preference for fowls that are not black-legged reflects the fact that dark-shanked breeds show more pigment in the skin once plucked. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management and its many later revisions, of which this alphabetical "All About Cookery" is one, set out such entries in a form closer to reference material than to step-by-step recipes, on the assumption that a cook would be handed a bird whole and feathered and needed to know what to do with every part of it. The note that fowls are "scarce in early spring" is a reminder of pre-industrial poultry keeping, when hens stopped laying and flocks thinned before the new season's birds came on.