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Chicken Pot-Pie
1 chicken 3 tablespoons flour Salt and pepper 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk Clean, singe and cut up the chicken, place it in a pot and nearly cover with water. Cover the pot and simmer gently. An old fowl will require at least three or four hours' slow cooking, but a year-old chicken should be done in one and one-half hours. Remove the cover during the last half-hour of cooking, to reduce the gravy to about one and one-half pints when done. Three-fourths of an hour before time to serve, make dumplings, add to the chicken and cover. When the dumplings are done and ready to serve, add salt and pepper to the chicken and make the gravy by adding to the liquor in the kettle three tablespoons of flour stirred to a paste in one cup of milk. Skim out the chicken, lay it on a platter, place the dumplings on the top and pour over them the gravy.
A stewed fowl finished with dumplings and a milk-thickened gravy, in the plain style of American farm cooking. The instructions are sound; the arithmetic of the liquid is the part worth watching.
- The hinge: gravy volumeEverything depends on reducing the cooking liquor to about a pint and a half before the flour goes in. Uncover the pot for the last half hour as directed, and if the level is still high, lift the chicken out and boil the broth down hard rather than compensating with extra flour.
- Which birdThe recipe assumes a choice between an old fowl and a young bird. A modern supermarket chicken of 4-5 lb will be tender in about 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, which matches the recipe's time for the "year-old chicken", though today's birds are killed far younger and are not really the same thing. A true stewing hen, if you can find one, genuinely needs three to four hours.
- Simmer, do not boil"Simmer gently" means barely trembling water. A rolling boil shreds the breast meat and turns the broth cloudy, which matters here because the broth becomes the sauce.
- Dumplings on top, not inDumplings -- The recipe says only to add the dumplings and cover; it does not specify whether they float on the surface or go into the liquid, though steaming them under a tight lid is the usual method. Do not lift the lid while they cook; three-quarters of an hour is generous for modern baking-powder dumplings, which are usually done in 15-20 minutes.
- The milk thickeningFlour stirred into cold milk makes a slurry, not a roux. Add it in a thin stream while stirring the hot liquor, then let it cook two or three minutes so the raw flour taste disappears. Three tablespoons to a pint and a half gives a light, pourable gravy.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper go in only at the end, after the liquor has been reduced; the recipe gives no reason for this. Season the broth after reducing, and taste again after the milk goes in.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bird with dumplings serves six generously; there is no indication of quantity in the original.
Pot-pie in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American usage often meant no pastry at all: a fowl stewed in its own liquor with dumplings or squares of rolled dough steamed on top, closer to what a modern cook would call chicken and dumplings than to anything baked in a dish. The name survives in Pennsylvania Dutch bot boi, where the dough is cut in noodle-like squares and cooked in the broth. Recipes of this type are built around the old fowl, a hen past laying that had to be simmered for hours to be edible at all, and the instruction allowing three or four hours' cooking is a reminder that a tender young chicken was once the exception rather than the default.