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Seventh Day: Broth
No. 90. CHICKEN BROTH.
Boil an ordinary sized chicken in two quarts unsalted water, cracking the bones well before putting in the fowl. Cover it closely, and boil until the meat all falls to pieces. The water must be cold when the chicken is put in.
When done, strain the broth, to which add one tablespoonful rice or pearl barley, soaked in a little warm water, and simmer half an hour; then add four tablespoons milk, some salt and pepper and a little chopped parsley, and simmer five minutes. Be careful not to oversalt, but carry up a small salt-cellar on the waiter with the broth. Serve with dry toast.
A sickroom broth, written for children learning to cook for an invalid upstairs. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and a few timings need translating.
- The hinge: start cold, never boil hardStart cold — Cold water is the recipe's own instruction, and it matters: a gentle simmer gives a clearer, sweeter broth, while a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and turns it cloudy and greasy. The original does say "boil," but if you want a clear broth keep the surface just shivering.
- "Ordinary sized chicken"Probably a bird in the region of 3 to 4 lb, near enough a standard supermarket chicken today, though period birds varied. Two quarts is 8 cups of water; allow something like 2 to 2.5 hours for the meat to fall from the bone, and expect to finish with rather less liquid than you started with, since the pot is covered.
- Cracking the bonesSplitting the leg and thigh bones with the back of a heavy knife exposes the marrow and the collagen-rich joint ends, which is where the body of the broth comes from. Skip it and you get chicken-flavoured water.
- Skim before you thickenSkim and defat — The recipe says nothing about either, and covering the pot closely makes skimming awkward, but modern practice is to lift the scum as it rises and, better still, chill the strained broth and lift the fat cap. The four tablespoons of milk will not hide a greasy broth.
- Rice versus pearl barleyThey are not quite interchangeable at half an hour. White rice will be soft in about 20 minutes; pearl barley generally wants longer, so soak it well or start it earlier.
- The milkFour tablespoons of milk in several cups of broth is a token enrichment, not a cream soup. Add it off a hard simmer and hold it below a boil for the last five minutes so it does not separate.
- "On the waiter"A waiter is a serving tray. The instruction to under-salt and send up a small salt-cellar reflects invalid cookery, where the patient's tolerance for salt was unknown; season lightly and let the eater finish it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no portions; as written, with the broth carried up on a tray, it reads as sickroom cookery for one, with more left over. Keep the picked meat for something else — this recipe spends the chicken entirely on the liquid.
Six Little Cooks belongs to a nineteenth-century genre of instructional cookery written as a story, in which a group of children work through a course of lessons under an adult's eye; the recipes are numbered, and the lessons proceed day by day. Cooking for the sick was considered part of a girl's practical education, and books of the period routinely grouped gruels, beef tea, panada and chicken broth under headings like "Invalid Cookery." The details give the setting away: the broth is boiled unsalted so the salt can be judged at the bedside, it is carried up on a tray, and it arrives with dry toast, the standard convalescent accompaniment, since it was held at the time to be easier on the stomach than buttered bread. The technique itself — cold water start, cracked bones, long slow reduction, strained clear — is the same one professional kitchens still use for white stock, arrived at for the same reasons.