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Fowls, Broiled, and Mush- room Sauce
INGREDIENTS for dish for 5 persons. A large fowl; seasoning to taste, of pepper and salt, 2 handfuls of button mushrooms, 1 slice of lean ham, pint of thickened gravy, 1 teaspoonful of lemon juice, 1/21 teaspoonful of pounded sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 4s. 6d.
Cut the fowl into quarters, roast it until three-parts done, and keep it well basted whilst at the fire. Take the fowl up, broil it for a few minutes over a clear fire, and season it with pepper and salt. Have ready FOWL, BOILED. some mushroom sauce made in the following manner. Put the mushrooms into a stewpan with a small piece of butter, the ham, a seasoning of pepper and salt, and BROILED FOWL. the gravy simmer these gently for 1/24 hour, add the lemon-juice and sugar, dish the fowl, and pour the sauce round them.
TIME. To roast the fowl, 35 minutes; to broil it, 10 to 15 minutes.
SEASONABLE. In full season from May to January.
A two-stage treatment of a whole bird: part-roasted, then finished over direct heat, with a quick mushroom-and-ham gravy poured round. The method is sound and translates directly to a hot oven plus a grill or ridged pan.
- The hinge: don't finish the roasting on the grillThe fowl goes under the broiler already three-quarters cooked, so the grilling is for colour and a little char only. Bring the joints to 165F/74C at the thigh in the oven stage or shortly into the broiling, and pull them before the skin blackens.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; a brisk oven, in the region of 400F/200C, is the usual modern stand-in for a roasting fire. Thirty-five minutes will part-cook quarters from a medium bird; a larger bird needs longer, judged by temperature rather than the clock.
- "A large fowl"A Victorian fowl was often an older bird, tougher and more strongly flavoured than a supermarket chicken. Use a 4-5 lb chicken, or two poussins split in half if you want faster cooking.
- Cost and quantityThe 4s. 6d. is the original market price and has no modern meaning. As written the dish serves five with a starch alongside.
- Thickened gravyThis means a brown gravy already bound with flour, not a plain stock. The recipe as printed calls for a pint; a well-flavoured chicken or veal gravy is what is wanted, and less will do if you prefer a sauce merely poured round.
- Button mushroomsTwo handfuls is roughly 8 oz. Nineteenth-century buttons were small, firm and often peeled; if yours are large, quarter them so they cook through in the short simmer.
- Pounded sugarPounded or caster sugar here is a seasoning, not a sweetener, half a teaspoon at most, balancing the lemon juice. Add both at the end so the acid does not dull during simmering.
- The lean hamA single slice goes in to perfume the sauce; the recipe does not say what becomes of it, and it is easily lifted out before serving. Prosciutto or an unsmoked gammon offcut works; a heavily smoked ham will dominate.
- ServingThe closing fragment mentions a border of mashed potatoes, with the sauce poured round the fowl. That is worth keeping, as it catches the gravy.
Broiling a bird that had first been part-roasted is a technique of kitchens that cooked at an open fire: the joint hung or turned before the flames to cook through, then went onto a gridiron over clear coals for the browning and crisping that a spit could not give. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) and the later abridgements such as All About Cookery carried the technique forward into the age of the closed range, where the oven and the grill did the same two jobs. The sauce is a plain English mushroom gravy of the period, lifted with lemon juice and a pinch of sugar rather than with cream, and the note that the dish is in season from May to January reflects a time when fowls were laying birds first and eating birds second, killed off as their production fell.