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To Boil Chicken
Boil only a well grown chicken. If tough it can be made tender by adding 1 tablespoon vinegar to the water. Sometimes steaming old chickens makes them tender. If to be served whole, stuff with bread dressing, tie it in shape. Cover with boiling water, add vinegar and 1 tablespoon salt. When tender serve with sauce made with 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup chicken broth. Cut giblets fine and add to sauce. Run into oven and brown chicken if desired.
A boiled fowl was the standard treatment for a bird past its laying prime, and the method still works — provided the water never actually boils.
- Simmer, do not boilA rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and squeezes out moisture, leaving stringy meat and cloudy broth. Bring the water up, then hold it at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, for the whole cooking time.
- "Well grown chicken"This would have meant a mature hen, likely in the 4-6 lb range, tougher and far more flavourful than a supermarket broiler. A modern roasting chicken of 4-5 lb will be tender in about 1 to 1 1/4 hours; a true stewing hen may want 2 to 3.
- The vinegarOne tablespoon in several quarts of water does very little chemically; whatever it does is more a matter of flavour than of texture. Long slow heat, not acid, is what breaks down the connective tissue in an old bird.
- Stuffing a poached birdBread dressing packed inside a simmered chicken heats slowly and unevenly. Pack it loosely and check the centre of the dressing reaches 165F before serving, or cook the dressing separately in a dish.
- The sauceOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of broth gives a thin pouring sauce. For something that coats, use two tablespoons of each. Cook the roux a minute before adding liquid so it does not taste of raw flour.
- GibletsSimmer the heart and gizzard alongside the bird for about an hour and the liver for the last ten minutes only, then chop fine. Liver boiled the full time turns grainy and bitter.
- BrowningIf you finish it in the oven, pat the skin dry, brush with butter, and use a hot oven — 450F for 10 to 15 minutes. A moderate oven will only dry the bird without colouring it.
- Save the liquidThe cooking water is chicken broth and the best part of the operation. Strain it, chill it, lift the fat, and keep what you do not use for the sauce.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bird serves four to six, with dressing and sauce.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia newspapers and published this book in 1920, when the habits of wartime food conservation were still fresh and nothing edible was wasted. A boiled fowl was the honest end of a hen that had stopped laying: too sinewy to roast, but excellent when coaxed slowly in water that gave back a pot of broth as a second dividend. The instruction to stuff, truss, and then optionally brown the bird in the oven suggests a cook dressing a frugal dish up as a company one. Boiled fowl served under a sauce was long familiar in English cookery, though here the sauce is built on the bird's own broth rather than milk. Birds bred to be tender in an hour were still some way off.