Fowl, Roast
INGREDIENTS sufficient for 8 persons. -A pair of fowls, a little flour, butter. AVERAGE COST, 5s. to 6s. per pair.
When firmly trussed, singe them all over; put them down to a bright, clear fire, paper the breasts with a sheet of buttered paper, and keep the fowls well basted.
Roast them for 3/4 hour, more or less, according to the size, and 10 minutes before serving, remove the paper, dredge the fowls with a little fine flour, put a piece of butter into ROAST FOWL. the basting-ladle, and as it melts baste the fowls with it; when nicely frothed and of a rich colour, serve with good brown gravy (a little of which should be poured over the fowls), and a tureen of well-made bread Mushroom or oyster sauce are very suitable accompaniments to roast fowl. sauce.
Chicken is roasted in the same manner.
TIME. A very large fowl, quite 1 hour, a medium-sized one, hour; chicken, hour, or rather longer.
SEASONABLE all the year, but scarce in early spring.
This is spit-roasting written for an open fire, and the two things that need translating are the heat source and the doneness. Everything else is technique that still works.
- A pair of fowlsA Victorian table fowl was generally smaller and leaner than a modern supermarket bird. Two of them feed eight, per the recipe; a single modern 4-5 lb roaster is closer to six servings.
- Fowl is not chickenIn this book a "fowl" is a full-grown bird and a "chicken" a young one, and the timings distinguish between them (the figures for a medium fowl and for chicken have dropped out of this printing).
- Down to a bright, clear fireThe bird turned on a spit in front of a fire, radiantly heated from one side, with a dripping pan beneath. The book gives no oven temperature; a hot oven of around 400F is a reasonable modern substitute for the browning the open fire supplied.
- SingeingThis burns off the hair-fine pin feathers left after plucking, traditionally over a flame or a lit taper. Modern birds arrive clean; skip it, or run a gas flame over any stubs.
- Papering the breastA sheet of buttered paper tied over the breast shields the leanest, fastest-cooking part while the legs catch up. Buttered parchment or foil, removed for the last stretch, does the same job.
- The timing will not doThree-quarters of an hour, even an hour for a large bird, is short by modern reckoning. Roast to an internal temperature of 165F/74C in the thickest part of the thigh, clear of the bone, and rest the bird 15 minutes before carving.
- FrothingThe dredge of flour followed by basting with melted butter is what produces the crisp, blistered, "nicely frothed" skin. It works in an oven too, but only in the last 10 minutes and only at high heat, or the flour tastes raw.
- AccompanimentsBread sauce is milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with breadcrumbs and finished with butter. Oyster sauce here means oysters warmed in a cream or veloute sauce, not the Cantonese bottled condiment.
- The price5s. to 6s. per pair was a substantial sum for a household of modest means, which is part of why roast fowl reads as a Sunday or company dish rather than a weeknight one.
Roast fowl sits at the centre of the Victorian English dinner as the plainest possible statement of good housekeeping: no sauce cooked into it, no stuffing, nothing but butter, flour and attention. The method described is spit-roasting, which by the 1860s was already being displaced by the closed range oven, and Beeton's insistence on a "bright, clear fire" and constant basting belongs to the older practice, in which a servant or a clockwork jack kept the bird turning. Note the seasonality line: fowls were scarce in early spring, a scarcity often attributed to hens being occupied with laying and sitting, and something of that seasonal rhythm long persisted in British poultry pricing. The pairing with bread sauce is distinctively English and is generally traced to the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread rather than flour or egg; it outlived that technique everywhere except beside roast birds, where it remains.