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Fricasseed Chicken
1 chicken 2 tablespoons butter or other fat 2 cups chicken stock 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk or cream 1 egg-yolk Salt and pepper Herbs Salt pork Rice or dumplings Singe, clean and cut up the chicken. Brown in a pan with the butter, drippings or chicken fat. Cover with boiling water, add salt, pepper, herbs and a few slices of salt pork. Simmer until tender (about an hour), strain and thicken one pint of the liquor with the flour mixed to a smooth paste with a little cold water; add the milk or cream beaten with the yolk of the egg. Heat again until slightly thickened, pour over the chicken and serve with rice or dumplings.
A classic white fricassee: brown, stew, then finish the cooking liquor with a flour paste and an egg-yolk liaison. The finishing sauce is where it succeeds or curdles.
- Do not boil the sauce after the yolk goes inOnce the milk-and-yolk mixture is added, hold the sauce below a simmer (about 160-175F) and stir until it coats a spoon. A boil will scramble the yolk and the sauce will break into grains.
- What "1 chicken" meantA book of this period would most likely intend a mature fowl rather than a young broiler, which would account for the hour or more of simmering. A supermarket roasting chicken of 3 1/2-4 lb, cut into eight pieces, is tender in 35-45 minutes; a stewing hen still wants 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours.
- SingeingThis removed pinfeathers and down from a bird plucked at home. Commercially dressed chicken needs nothing beyond a check for stray feather tips.
- Salt porkTwo or three thin slices, roughly 2 oz, is a reasonable amount for the 'few slices' called for. It is there for salt and fat, so reduce the added salt accordingly. Blanched bacon or pancetta can stand in.
- HerbsUnspecified, as was common. A bay leaf, a few parsley stems and a sprig of thyme suit the dish; the sauce is pale and delicate, so keep them mild and remove them before thickening.
- The pint of liquorOne pint is 2 cups, which matches the chicken stock in the ingredient list. Cover the chicken barely with boiling water so the finished broth is concentrated rather than watery, and skim the fat before thickening.
- Thickening ratioTwo tablespoons flour to a pint of stock plus a cup of milk gives a thin, pourable sauce. If you want it to cling, use three tablespoons, and cook the flour paste in the stock for a good two minutes to lose the raw taste.
- YieldServes four, or five to six over rice or with dumplings.
Fricassee is a long-established French cooking term in English kitchens, in use from the sixteenth century for meat cut up, cooked in fat, then stewed in a small amount of liquid and served in its own sauce. Finishing the pale version with cream and egg yolk was a common treatment for an older, tougher bird: a laying hen past her productive years was too sinewy to roast but good stewed, and the liaison turned the resulting broth into a dish worth serving. Its appearance in the New Delineator Recipes, published by the Butterick company, which was also a pattern publisher, belongs to a period when a household bird might still arrive needing to be singed and drawn at home. As broiler chickens became a year-round commodity in the decades that followed, long-stewed fricassee gave way to quicker roasting and frying.