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Barbecued Chicken
Prepare the chickens as for broiling; lay them in a dripping pan with the skin side up; season with pepper and salt and put in a hot oven. Cook for about three quarters of an hour, basting occasionally with butter and water. Serve with brown sauce made as for broiled chicken.
A split-and-roasted bird rather than anything off a grill. The recipe assumes you know two other entries in the book — how to prepare a chicken for broiling, and how to make the brown sauce — so both need filling in.
- "Prepared as for broiling"Split the bird down the backbone and open it flat, snapping the breastbone so it lies without rocking. A pair of shears and a firm press with the heel of the hand does it. This is spatchcocking under an older name.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F by the usual period reckoning; the book gives no number and its ovens were unmeasured. Heat in that range lets a split bird brown while the interior finishes.
- Bird size is the variableThe recipe does not say what size bird it assumes, but three quarters of an hour suits the small broilers of the period, commonly around two to two and a half pounds. A modern supermarket chicken of 3 1/2 to 4 lb, split, will want closer to an hour. Judge by temperature, not the clock -- 165F in the thickest part of the thigh.
- Skin side up, and leave itThere is no turning in this recipe. The dripping pan catches the fat, the skin faces the heat the whole time, and the breast stays covered by its own skin. Resist flipping it.
- Basting with butter and waterThe recipe gives neither proportions nor an interval, only "occasionally". Melted butter let down with hot water, brushed or spooned on a few times during cooking, answers it; the water keeps the butter from scorching and loosens the pan glaze rather than serving as a sauce.
- The brown sauceThe cross-referenced recipe under broiled chicken is not given here; in books of this type it is normally a browned butter-and-flour roux let down with stock, a small quantity of brown gravy rather than a French espagnole. Pan drippings deglazed with a little stock will stand in.
- Dripping panAny shallow roasting pan or rimmed sheet. Shallow matters: a deep-sided pan traps steam and the skin will not brown.
- YieldNot stated; the recipe is written for more than one bird. Reckon one split broiler for two, a 4 lb bird for three to four.
"Barbecued" in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently meant nothing about smoke or open fire. It described a bird or a small animal split flat, seasoned, and cooked with repeated bastings — a sense closer to the Caribbean-derived original, where barbacoa named the frame the split carcass lay on, than to the sauce-and-grill dish the word now calls up. Note that there is no tomato, no vinegar, no sugar and no smoke here at all: the seasoning is pepper and salt, the basting liquid is butter and water, and the accompaniment is a plain brown gravy. The sweet, thick red barbecue sauce that came to define the word in the United States spread commercially only later, and household cookbooks of the period still used "barbecued" simply to mean split and basted. The technique also reflects the poultry of the period: young broilers weighing two pounds or so, sold seasonally and cooked quickly, rather than the uniform year-round four-pounder.