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Fricassee Of Chicken
Prepare and cut up as for fried chicken. Put into saucepan with just enough boiling water to cover; add a teaspoon salt, a little pepper and, if desired, a teaspoon of onion juice. Boil slowly 2 hours or until tender; add a little water from time to time, as it boils away. When finished there should be 2 cups of stock. Thicken with a tablespoon flour mixed with a little cold water and add tablespoon of finely chopped parsley. Serve in border of hot boiled rice and if desired garnish with green peas.
A plain white fricassee — poached chicken in its own thickened broth — written for a bird much tougher than anything sold today. The cooking time is the one number to ignore.
- Two hours is for a stewing henThe recipe gives no weight, but a two-hour boil points to a mature fowl with plenty of hard-working muscle. A supermarket chicken cut into eight or ten pieces is tender in 35 to 45 minutes; breast pieces are done sooner and can be lifted out early and returned at the end.
- "Boil slowly" means simmerA bare tremble at the surface, lid ajar. An actual rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres tight and clouds the stock, which here is also the sauce, so clarity matters.
- Cut up as for fried chickenTwo drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, the breast split in two or four, and the back and neck in for flavour. Skin on is traditional; skinning the pieces gives a leaner, less gelatinous sauce.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour with no visible pieces: grate half an onion and squeeze it through a sieve or cloth. A teaspoon is about what half a small onion yields.
- Reduce to two cups before thickeningThe instruction to top up with water as it boils away, then finish with exactly two cups of stock, is the recipe's hinge. If you have more, boil it down uncovered with the chicken removed; the flour quantity is calibrated to that volume.
- The thickening is deliberately lightOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of liquid gives a thin, pourable gravy, not a cream sauce. Whisk it smooth with a few tablespoons of cold water, stir it in, and simmer two or three minutes so the starch loses its raw taste.
- Rice borderAbout a cup of raw long-grain rice, boiled and drained, packed into a ring around the edge of a hot platter with the chicken and gravy in the centre. A buttered ring mould pressed and turned out gives a neater border.
- YieldThe recipe gives no size or number of servings. A modern 3½ to 4 lb chicken will serve about four, or five with the rice and peas.
Fricassee comes into English from French in the sixteenth century, from fricasser, usually glossed as to fry or to stew, though the origin of the French verb is itself uncertain; by the nineteenth century American cookbooks commonly distinguished two kinds: the brown fricassee, floured and browned first, and the white, in which the chicken is never coloured at all and the pale broth becomes the sauce. This is the white kind, stripped further still — other versions of the period finished it with cream, butter, or a beaten egg yolk, while this one leans on nothing but flour and parsley. That restraint fits its source: the New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company as promotional literature, so it favours short ingredient lists and household staples. The two-hour boil suggests the poultry of the era, when a chicken destined for the pot was often a laying hen past her productive years rather than a bird raised for meat.