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Chicken Fricassee
Prepare the chicken as for stewing; putin a frying pan with a little water and cook slowly, adding salt when the chicken is half done. When nearly done, allow the water to boil away until the pan is almost dry; add butter or pork fat and sauté the chicken until brown. Lay the pieces on toast; make a brown sauce in the pan and pour around them.
This is a good way to serve fowls, which are made tender by the long cooking.
A braise-then-brown method rather than the white fricassee most modern cooks expect. The order matters: the bird stews until tender, then the liquid is driven off and the same pan does the browning.
- What "a fowl" meansA fowl is a mature laying hen, tough and full-flavoured, which is why the recipe promises the long cooking makes it tender. A supermarket broiler of 3-4 lb will be done in 35-45 minutes; a true stewing hen wants 1.5 to 2.5 hours.
- "Prepare as for stewing"Cut into serving pieces: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, breast halved or quartered, back and neck in for flavour. Some books of this period add the giblets as well.
- A little water is not a littleWater -- The recipe calls only for "a little water" and does not mention covering the pan. Keep the heat low and add more water if it threatens to dry out before the bird is tender; the dish depends on a slow simmer.
- Salt at halfwayThe recipe is specific about the timing, adding salt only when the chicken is half done. It gives no reason for this.
- The hinge: don't scorch the fondWhen the water boils away, the pan is left with concentrated gelatin and browned residue. Drop the heat before adding the butter or pork fat, or that residue burns and the brown sauce turns bitter.
- "Make a brown sauce in the pan"Assumed knowledge for the period: lift the chicken out, stir a spoonful of flour into the fat, cook it to a nut colour, then whisk in stock or the reserved cooking liquid. Season and strain if you like it smooth.
- Pork fatRendered salt pork or lard.
- ToastFirm white bread, toasted dry, absorbs the sauce without collapsing; the recipe does not specify the kind. Figure roughly four servings from a 3-4 lb bird.
Fricassee entered English cookery from French in the sixteenth century and had long since split into two camps: the white fricassee, where the meat is stewed and finished with cream and egg yolk, and the brown, where it is stewed then coloured in fat and served with a flour-thickened gravy. This is squarely the brown version, and its real subject is economy. A household that kept hens for eggs eventually had to eat them, and an old bird is too tough to roast or fry outright, so the recipe stews it soft first and only then gives it the browned surface a fried chicken would have. Loose-leaf cook books of Mrs. Fryer's era were sold as binders that a cook could add to and rearrange.