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Fowl, Roast, Stuffed
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons. A large fowl, forcemeat, a little flour. AVERAGE COST, 4s.
Select a large plump fowl, fill the breast with forcemeat, truss it firmly, the same as for a plain roast fowl, dredge it with flour, and put it down to a bright fire. Roast it for nearly or quite an hour, should it be very large; remove the skewers, and serve with a good brown gravy and a tureen of bread sauce.
TIME.-Large fowl, nearly or quite 1 hour.
SEASONABLE all the year, but scarce in early spring.
Note. Sausage-meat stuffing may be substituted for the forcemeat. Fowl Sauté, with Peas. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS. The remains of cold roast fowl, 2 oz. of butter, pepper, salt and pounded mace to taste, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, 1/2 pint of weak stock, 1 pint of green peas, 1 teaspoonful of pounded sugar. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold fowl. 9d.
Cut the fowl into nice pieces; put the butter into a stewpan; sautez or fry the fowl a nice brown colour, previously sprinkling it with pepper, salt and pounded mace. Dredge in the flour, shake the ingredients well round, then add the stock and peas, and stew till the latter are tender, which will be in about 20 minutes; put in the pounded sugar and serve, placing the chicken round, and the peas in the middle of the dish. When liked mushrooms may be substituted for the peas TIME.-Altogether, 40 minutes.
SEASONABLE from June to August.
FOWL SCOLLOPS.
Fowl Scollops. (Cold Meat Cookery.)-INGREDIENTS. - The remains of cold roast or boiled fowl, pint of Béchamel, or white sauce.
Strip off the skin from the fowl; cut the meat into thin slices, and warm them in about 1/2 pint, or rather more of Béchamel or white sauce. When quite hot, serve, and garnish the dish with rolled ham or bacon toasted.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer the slices of fowl.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Fowl, To Stuff and Bone. (Miss ACTON'S Recipe.) - Cut through the skin down the centre of the back, and raise the flesh carefully on either side with the point of a sharp knife, until the sockets of the int wings and thighs are reached. Till a little practice has been gained, it will perhaps be best to bone their joints before proceeding further; but after they are once detached from it, the whole of the body may be easily separated from the flesh, and taken FOWL, BONED. out entire; only the neck, bones and the merrythought will then remain to be removed. The bird thus prepared may either be restored to its original form by filling the legs and wings with forcemeat, and the body with chopped tongue or bacon, sausage meat or forcemeat, such as will give a marbled appearance to the bird when cut, and then be sewed up and trussed as usual; or the legs and wings may be drawn inside the body, when less stuffing will be required. In any case the fowl when cooked should present a smooth rounded surface easy to carve.
FRENCH TERMS. ance of good cookery, and mastering its science.
We have now schools within the reach of even the poorest, where English girls can learn, not only how to bake, boil and stew, but what should be treated in these various modes of cooking, and why; also the most economical way of using and cooking food. Advancing higher, we now learn from good cookery books as well as schools how to make the various dainty dishes that used to be out of the reach of English cooks, but "Honour to whom Honour is due; " it is to the French we owe our inspiration to become perfect in the art of cookery.
Most of the entrées and made dishes which are, by reason of their delicate sauces and flavouring, as well as by the difficulty of their preparation esteemed more highly than simply cooked food, we owe to the cleverness of the French cooks, and it is rare that we ever give them English names; but a still greater advantage in French cookery is how to make the most of and utilize everything in the way of food.
In the kitchen of the lower middle class and the poorer of the French people, no matter to what class they belong, there is far less meat-the most costly of our provisions-consumed, than in the same classes here, yet the fare is more varied, more dainty and more appetising than ours.
In one thing we must all agree in reference to French cookery, and that is, that their way of treating vegetables is superior to ours and that in their hands they become not simply accessories, but in themselves one of the pleasantest of foods.
French Terms used in modern Household Cookery, explained.
Four related fowl recipes plus Eliza Acton's boning method, written for a spit before an open fire and for birds tougher and leaner than anything sold today. The timings are the part that needs most adjustment.
- The hinge: roasting time"Nearly or quite 1 hour" assumed a bird turning close to a fierce open fire, and a smaller carcass than a modern roaster. A stuffed 4-5 lb chicken at 375-400F needs roughly 1 1/2 hours, and should be judged by a thermometer reading 165F in the thigh, not by the clock.
- A large fowl"Fowl" in Victorian usage generally means a full-grown table bird rather than a young chicken. No weight is given, but the bird was probably smaller than a modern roaster. A 4-5 lb free-range bird will give the firmer flesh the recipe expects.
- Stuffing the breastForcemeat packed into the crop end must reach 165F itself, which is what pushes the total time up. Cooking the forcemeat separately in a small dish gives a better-browned bird and removes the guesswork.
- Bright fire, no ovenA spit-roast bird was basted and dredged with flour to build a crust. The book gives no oven setting; as a modern equivalent, start at 425F for 20 minutes, then drop to 375F. The flour dredge still works and gives a crisp browned crust.
- Pints and spoonsAll liquid measures are imperial: a pint is 20 fl oz, so the "1/2 pint of weak stock" in the sauté is about 1 1/4 US cups, and the "pint of green peas" is a generous volume measure of shelled peas, roughly 1 lb.
- Peas for 20 minutesPeas at this date were often shelled at a more mature stage than we buy now, and sugar was commonly added; 20 minutes' stewing suits them. Frozen or young fresh peas are ruined by this; add them in the last 4-5 minutes of the stew and skip or halve the sugar.
- Pounded maceGround mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for a whole bird's worth of meat; nutmeg at half the quantity is a fair substitute.
- The scollopsOne minute of simmering is deliberate. Already-cooked fowl only needs heating through; longer cooking in Béchamel turns it stringy. The recipe's "1/2 pint, or rather more" is about 1 1/4 US cups of sauce.
- MerrythoughtThe wishbone, which Acton leaves for last in the boning sequence. Her method is easiest on a bird at cool room temperature with a short, flexible boning knife, and a boned stuffed fowl needs trussing or netting to hold its shape.
These entries sit in the middle of Mrs Beeton's alphabetical run on fowl, and together they show the two halves of the Victorian middle-class kitchen: the set-piece roast served with brown gravy and a tureen of bread sauce, and the "Cold Meat Cookery" that turned Sunday's carcass into Monday's saut et andEnt, and Tuesday's scollops. The average cost of 4s. for the roast was real money for a household living on a few hundred pounds a year. The boning instructions are credited to Miss Acton, that is Eliza Acton, whose Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) preceded Beeton and was borrowed from freely by her and by later editors of her book. The essay fragment on French cookery that follows is characteristic of the period's anxious admiration for the French kitchen, particularly its handling of vegetables and its thrift, both of which the Beeton tradition tried hard to import.