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Braised Chicken, 2
Have a young chicken jointed, flour it, melt plenty of butter and let chicken slowly brown with 1 cup diced raw ham, keeping closely covered. Add a little broth or water and seasonings, remembering that the ham will furnish some of the salt. Reduce heat, keep closely covered, and after 25 minutes, add 11/2 cups canned button mushrooms or cut up wild ones, shaking the pan gently to mix. Keep covered tightly. The mushrooms will furnish some liquid and perhaps the sauce will need to be thickened with bits of flour and butter kneaded together. Lift cover for a second and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons applejack or whisky. Close quickly, take from fire, and eat at once.
A one-pan braise built on the fat from diced ham, cooked tightly covered so the chicken steams as much as it browns. It reads as camp or cabin cooking, and works equally well on a home burner in a heavy lidded skillet or Dutch oven.
- The hinge: keep it coveredEvery stage says "closely covered," and that is what makes the dish. With only a little broth added, the lid traps the moisture from the chicken and mushrooms and does the actual cooking; lifting it repeatedly will dry the pan and you will end up frying rather than braising.
- Chicken size and timingA "young chicken" means a small frying bird; the recipe specifies neither a weight nor a number of joints. The 25 minutes before the mushrooms go in is a braising stage, and the recipe has you serve shortly after they are added, so check that the thigh joint reads 165F before taking it off and give it longer if it does not.
- Diced raw hamThis means uncooked country-style or salt-cured ham, closer to a slab of pancetta or an unsmoked gammon than to the wet-cured deli ham sold in slices. Any of those will render fat and salt into the butter; taste before adding any salt at all.
- MushroomsCanned button mushrooms can be drained, though the recipe expects them to furnish some liquid; 1 1/2 cups is approximately the drained contents of two 8 oz cans, and if you use fresh, allow around 8 oz of quartered buttons to account for shrinkage. Wild mushrooms should only be ones you can identify with certainty.
- Beurre manieThe "bits of flour and butter kneaded together" is beurre manie, equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste. Drop it in pea-sized pieces into the simmering liquid and swirl; a tablespoon of each is plenty for this quantity.
- The applejackTwo tablespoons of spirit sprinkled over a hot covered pan off the heat is there for aroma, not for flambeing. Apple brandy suits the ham; bourbon or Calvados works as well.
- YieldServes four. It wants bread, rice or boiled potatoes to take up the pan sauce, which is the best part of the dish.
Braising a jointed bird with salt pork or ham, butter and mushrooms is long-established French country practice, and it travelled easily into American hunting-camp and cabin cooking because it needs one covered pot and no oven. The applejack at the end suggests the eastern United States, where apple brandy was a common farm spirit -- though the recipe itself offers whisky as an equal alternative. The instruction to use "canned button mushrooms or cut up wild ones" is a good marker of the period: tinned mushrooms were a reliable pantry staple in a way that fresh cultivated ones were not, and anyone cooking outdoors was as likely to have picked their own.