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Chicken Pie (Place hot fricassee chicken)
Place hot fricassee chicken and gravy in a baking dish. Make a rich crust and place on top of chicken. Place in cooker for one half hour. Use two radiators.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, meaning it assumes a separate cooked dish (the fricassee) and an insulated box that finishes the job with stored heat. Almost none of that translates directly, so the useful work here is figuring out what the instruction was trying to achieve.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest with wells for cooking vessels, sold heavily between about 1905 and 1925. It cooked nothing on its own; it simply slowed the loss of heat already in the food and in the heated stone or iron discs placed above and below.
- "Two radiators"Radiators were soapstone or cast-iron discs heated on the range or in the oven until very hot, then dropped into the cooker wells. Two meant one under the dish and one over it, for the most heat the box could supply. There is no modern equivalent to buy.
- Everything must go in boiling hotThis is the hinge of all fireless cookery. The chicken and gravy must be at a full simmer when they go into the dish, because the box adds no heat of its own. A lukewarm filling would sit for half an hour in the danger zone and the crust would never set.
- The crust will not brownThe crust may not brown well -- with two very hot radiators the box could manage some baking, but the heat is falling throughout and the result is easily pale and slack. For a reliable crust, bake the assembled pie in a conventional oven at 425F for 20 to 25 minutes instead, until the crust is set and coloured and the gravy bubbles at the edges.
- "A rich crust"In this period that means either a short pastry at roughly half fat to flour, or a rich baking-powder biscuit dough rolled about half an inch thick. Either works; the biscuit version is more forgiving over a wet filling.
- Fricassee chickenA chicken jointed and gently stewed in water or stock with onion and seasoning, the liquid thickened with flour and often finished with cream or egg yolk. Assume the meat is fully tender before it ever reaches the pie dish; nothing here will tenderise it further.
- Gravy consistencyThicken the fricassee gravy more than you would for serving over rice. A thin gravy under a lid of pastry boils up and soaks the underside of the crust.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. A chicken of roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb with its gravy would fill about a 2-quart baking dish and serve four to six.
Fireless cookery was a brief, serious enthusiasm in American household management, promoted as fuel economy and as a way to leave dinner unattended in an era when the alternative was tending a coal or wood range all afternoon. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format, with its own section for the cooker, reflects how confidently the method was expected to become standard equipment. This particular entry shows the method's real limitation plainly: the pie is largely held together in the box rather than baked in it, since even with two radiators the heat only falls from the moment the lid closes. When gas and electric ovens with reliable thermostats became common in the 1920s, the insulated chest lost its reason to exist, and the technique survives now mainly in the slow cooker and in the camping habit of burying a hot pot in blankets.