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Chicken Pudding
I YOUNG CHICKEN, JOINTED 4 SPRIGS PARSLEY 1/2 BAY LEAF I SPRIG THYME SALT AND PEPPER BUTTER 2 EGGS, BEATEN VERY LIGHT I CUP MILK 2 TABLESPOONS MELTED I CUP FLOUR BUTTER Cover chicken with boiling water and cook with herbs until nearly done; season while cooking. Lay chicken in buttered baking dish and spread with a little butter. Reserve cooking liquor for gravy. Mix eggs with milk and melted butter. Sift flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt and add, stirring until smooth. Pour over chicken, and bake about 45 minutes in Dutch oven before medium heat. Reduce chicken liquor by rapid boiling until rich. Make gravy, adding a little cream and thickening with flour. Serve chicken pudding from baking dish and pass gravy.
A Virginia-style chicken pudding: poached chicken finished under a pouring batter, done here in a lidded Dutch oven over coals. The batter is the whole point, so treat it like a Yorkshire pudding rather than a cake.
- The hinge: heat under the batterGet the chicken and the buttered dish genuinely hot before the batter goes on, and have the oven up to temperature. Batter poured over lukewarm chicken sits and steams instead of puffing.
- "Medium heat" in a Dutch ovenThe recipe gives no temperature, so this is a judgement call: somewhere in the 350-375F range works. For a 12-inch camp oven, roughly 8 coals underneath and 16 on the lid puts you around the lower end of that; in a kitchen oven, 350-375F for 40 to 45 minutes until the top is set and browned.
- Batter proportionsThe batter is 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk, 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons melted butter, with 1/2 teaspoon salt sifted into the flour. Whisk the liquids first and add the flour to them for a smooth, thin, pourable batter.
- "Young chicken" means smallSomething like a 2 1/2 to 3 lb broiler-fryer will do, jointed. Nearly done in simmering water is roughly 20 to 25 minutes for dark meat, less for breast, and the pieces should still be slightly underdone since they get another 45 minutes in the oven.
- Simmer, do not boilThe recipe says boiling water, but hold the pot at a bare simmer once the chicken is in. A rolling boil shreds the outside of the meat and clouds the liquor you want for gravy.
- The gravyStrain the poaching liquor, discard the herbs, and reduce it hard to a cup or so. Thicken with a tablespoon of flour cooked in butter, then finish with a few tablespoons of cream off the heat.
- Lid disciplineEvery time the Dutch oven lid comes off, the batter loses lift and the top coals lose heat. Check once at about 35 minutes and not before.
- YieldServes four generously as a one-dish meal, with the gravy passed separately.
Chicken pudding was a fixture of Virginia cookery from the early nineteenth century onward, and Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife (1824) gives a version very close to this one: fowl parboiled, laid in a dish, and covered with an egg-and-milk batter. The word pudding here carries its older, savory English sense of a batter or paste cooked around meat, the same family that produced Yorkshire pudding and toad-in-the-hole. Its appearance in an outdoor-cooking book is a practical choice rather than a nostalgic one: a covered Dutch oven banked with coals stands in for a baking oven, and the poaching step gives you the gravy at the same time as the meat, with only one pot and one dish to wash.