Home › Fireless Cookery › Roast Chicken (Time necessary for roasting)
Roast Chicken (Time necessary for roasting)
The time necessary for roasting a chicken depends on the age of the bird. One hour and a half is sufficient for a young chicken, but an older one should be roasted two hours, and a very tough chicken three hours. If this course is followed, old chickens will turn out as tender and savory as spring chickens. Prepare the chicken in the usual method for the oven. It will not be necessary to heat the chicken to brown it before it has been placed in the cooker, for if both radiators have been made very hot the chicken when roasted will be nicely browned. It is not necessary to open the cooker for basting as the hot steam prevents burning.
This is not oven roasting. It belongs to the fireless-cooker section of the book: a whole bird is set into an insulated box with preheated iron or soapstone discs ("radiators") above and below, the lid is shut, and the box is left alone for one to three hours with no further heat added. That method is the reason the instructions cannot be followed today.
- Why the caution is hereA fireless cooker adds no heat after the lid closes. The stored heat in the radiators falls steadily from the moment they go in, and a whole chicken absorbs a great deal of it while its interior is still cold. Poultry can spend an hour or more between roughly 40F and 140F, the range in which Salmonella and Campylobacter multiply fastest, and nothing in the recipe measures or confirms otherwise.
- The tough-bird instruction makes it worseThe three-hour setting for an old fowl is the longest and therefore the coolest cook of the three. By the end of it the box interior may be well under a safe holding temperature while the thickest part of the thigh has never been verified at 165F. Longer time in a cooling box is not the same as longer time in an oven.
- "Do not open the cooker""Not necessary to open the cooker" -- The recipe assures the cook there is no need to lift the lid, and the method depends on keeping it shut, which also means never taking a temperature. There is no point in the process at which the cook can check the bird, and a chicken that looks and smells fine can still be unsafe.
- Browning without heatThe claim that very hot radiators will brown the bird by themselves is optimistic even on its own terms. Radiator temperatures varied enormously with the stove, the metal and how long the discs were heated, which is exactly the sort of variation that makes the timings above unreliable.
- Not the same as a slow cookerA modern slow cooker is powered throughout and holds a set temperature for the whole cook; a fireless cooker only loses heat. Do not read these times across to any electric appliance. If you want a slow-cooked whole chicken, use a current recipe written for the equipment you own.
- What is still sound hereThe underlying observation, that an old bird needs long gentle cooking to become tender while a young one does not, is correct and survives into modern braising and pot-roasting practice. The delivery method is the part that has been retired.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American and European households from roughly 1900 through the First World War, and cookbooks of the period not uncommonly carried a chapter on it. The principle is that of the Norwegian hay box: bring food to temperature on the range, then transfer it to a heavily insulated chest so that stored heat finishes the cooking without further fuel. Manufactured cookers, lined with materials such as felt, mineral wool or ground cork and fitted with soapstone or cast-iron discs to be heated on the stove, were sold as a way to save fuel, keep a summer kitchen cool, and free the cook from watching a pot, and interest in them rose again during wartime fuel economy campaigns. The confident promise here that an old chicken will come out like a spring chicken reflects a period preoccupation with tough mature fowl, which were the ordinary bird in a market not yet reorganised around fast-growing young broilers. This recipe itself argues that the sealed box cannot scorch or burn its contents; bacteriological understanding of the danger zone in poultry was still decades from reaching the household kitchen.