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Roast Chicken (Stuff and truss the chicken)
Stuff and truss the chicken; season with pepper and dredge with flour. Put in a dripping pan with a little salt pork if the chicken is not especially fat. When heated add hot water and baste frequently. The oven should be hot and the time necessary for a large chicken will be about an hour and a half. When done, remove the chicken, pour off the grease and make a brown sauce in the pan.
A bare-bones roasting method that assumes the cook already knows how to stuff, truss and make pan gravy. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the doneness test, and what the salt pork is doing there.
- Oven temperature"Hot" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. A workable reading is to start at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 350F for the remainder; a bird held at the top of that range for a full ninety minutes risks a scorched breast before the thigh joint is done.
- Size and timingA "large chicken" here is probably a roaster in the 4-5 lb range rather than a modern 7 lb bird; ninety minutes suits about that weight. Ignore the clock in favour of a thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, not touching bone.
- StuffingPack it loosely and check that the centre of the stuffing itself also reaches 165F. Stuffing insulates, so a stuffed bird needs longer than an empty one, and the cavity is the last place to come up to temperature.
- The salt porkThe recipe simply puts "a little salt pork" in the pan with a lean bird, to supply fat for basting; laying thin sheets over the breast (barding) is the usual way of doing the same job. Fatty bacon or a well-buttered muslin substitutes; remove it for the last 20 minutes so the skin can colour.
- Dredging with flourA light dusting of flour over the damp skin browns early and gives the pan drippings body for the sauce. It is not a coating - a tablespoon patted over the whole bird is enough.
- "Add hot water"Perhaps half a cup, poured into the pan and not over the bird, to keep the drippings from burning. Top it up as it evaporates. Cold water into a hot pan can crack enamelware and will drop the oven temperature.
- Dripping panA shallow roasting pan. A rack is an improvement the original does not mention - it keeps the underside from stewing in the liquid.
- The brown saucePour off all but a couple of tablespoons of fat, stir in an equal weight of flour, cook until it smells nutty, then whisk in stock. The browned residue stuck to the pan is the whole point; scrape it up.
- Resting and yieldRest the bird 15 minutes under loose foil before carving - this also buys time for the gravy. A 4-5 lb roaster with stuffing serves four to six.
The recipes in this style are written for cooks who needed a reminder rather than a lesson - hence the assumption that "stuff and truss" needs no elaboration. The salt pork instruction is a period marker: American table chickens of the era were often barnyard birds killed at whatever age suited the household, and a bird that had spent its life scratching was lean enough that fat had to be added from outside. Barding with pork or laying a buttered cloth over the breast was common in nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery for this reason, and it faded from home kitchens as the fast-growing, well-fatted broiler chicken became the commercial standard in the middle of the twentieth century. The pan sauce made from the drippings, rather than a separately built sauce, is likewise the older habit.