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Fowl, Boiled, and Rice
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 4 persons.-1 fowl, mutton broth, 2 onions, 2 small blades of pounded mace, pepper and salt to taste, 1/4 pint of rice, parsley and butter. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 9d.
Truss the fowl as for boiling, and put it into a stewpan with sufficient clear, wellskimmed mutton broth to cover it; add the onion, mace and a seasoning of pepper and salt; stew very gently for about 1 hour, should the fowl be large and about 1/2 hour before it is ready, put in the rice, which should be well washed and soaked. When the latter is tender, strain it from the liquor, and put it on a sieve reversed, to dry before the fire, and, in the meantime, keep the fowl hot. Dish it, put the rice round as a border, pour a little parsley and butter over the fowl, and the remainder send to table in a tureen.
TIME. A large fowl, 1 hour.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Fowl, To Bone (for Fricassees,
A plain Victorian boiled fowl, poached in mutton broth and ringed with rice. The text is clipped at both ends in this edition -- the opening line about mashed potatoes belongs to the previous entry -- but the method is complete.
- The fowl itselfA Victorian "fowl" for boiling was usually a mature laying hen, tougher and more flavourful than anything sold today. A 3-4 lb chicken stands in; it will be done well before an old bird would be, so poach gently and check for 165F/74C at the thickest part of the thigh rather than trusting the hour.
- Gentle is the pointThe hinge of the dish is the word "gently." A bare shiver on the surface, never a rolling boil: hard boiling shreds the breast and clouds the broth that is meant to cook the rice.
- Mutton brothClear, well-skimmed mutton broth gives the dish its character. Lamb stock is the nearest modern equivalent; chicken stock works but makes a much blander plate. Skimming matters because the fat will otherwise coat the rice.
- 1/4 pint of riceRice measured by volume, not weight -- an imperial quarter pint is 5 fl oz, roughly 2/3 US cup, about 4 1/2 oz of long-grain. Washing and soaking were usual then to rinse off starch and milling dust; a good rinse is enough now.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in dried "blades." Pounded, two small blades come to something under half a teaspoon of ground mace. It was one of the commonest warm spices in Victorian white sauces and boiled poultry.
- Drying the riceStraining the rice and setting it on an upturned sieve before the fire drives off surface moisture so the grains stay separate. A 250F oven with the door ajar for a few minutes does the same thing.
- Parsley and butterIn Beeton this is not simply melted butter with parsley stirred in: her "melted butter" is itself a flour-thickened sauce let down with water, to which blanched, chopped parsley is added. Spoon a little over the bird and send the rest in a jug.
- Yield and costFour servings. The 2s 9d is the average cost Beeton gives for the whole dish at the time of writing.
Boiled fowl was a staple of the Victorian middle-class table, plain enough to be given to invalids and children as well as served at dinner, and Mrs Beeton gives several versions of it: with oysters, with celery sauce, with rice, with a border of mashed potato. Poaching an older bird in broth was a sensible treatment for a hen past laying, and the enriched liquor could serve as the basis of a soup afterwards. Cooking the rice in the same broth and banking it round the plate reflects a wider nineteenth-century English habit of using rice as a garnish rather than a grain in its own right. Mace and nutmeg carried a great many of the white sauces in the period's repertoire.