Home › Poultry And Game › Baked Chicken
Baked Chicken
Dress, clean, and cut up two chickens. Place in a dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and dot over with one-fourth cup butter. Bake thirty minutes in a hot oven, basting every five minutes with onefourth cup butter melted in one-fourth cup boiling water. Serve with gravy made by using fat in pan, one-fourth cup / flour, one cup each Chicken Stock and cream, salt and pepper. 1/4 cup butter Red pepper Green pepper
A straightforward roast of cut-up chicken with a pan gravy, written when a cook bought birds whole and unplucked. Two points need attention: the oven heat and the thirty-minute claim.
- "Dress, clean, and cut up"This means pluck, singe, draw and joint the birds. Buy two 3-3½ lb chickens already cut into eight pieces, or joint them yourself and keep the backs and wing tips for the stock the gravy calls for.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-450F. At that heat the flour dredge browns quickly, which is the point of the method.
- Thirty minutes is not enoughThirty minutes may not be enough -- bone-in thighs and drumsticks from a modern bird generally want about 35-45 minutes at that heat. Cook to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and pull the breast pieces earlier if they run ahead.
- Basting every five minutesSix or eight openings of the oven door will cost you the heat that browns the skin. Baste two or three times instead, and brush the melted butter-and-water mixture on rather than spooning pan juices, which is what the original intends.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan or a heavy rimmed sheet. Arrange the pieces in one layer, skin up, with a little space between them; crowded pieces steam.
- The gravy proportionsA quarter cup of flour cooked in the pan fat, then one cup chicken stock and one cup cream, gives a thick gravy by current taste. Scrape the browned flour off the pan bottom as you whisk, and thin with more stock if it sets too stiff.
- The trailing ingredient listThe fragment at the end -- butter, red pepper, green pepper -- appears to be stray text, its origin unclear. Nothing in the instructions uses peppers; ignore it.
- YieldTwo birds cut up serves six to eight.
The book was written for households that still bought poultry whole, often with feet and feathers on, which is why so many of its chicken recipes open with the word "dress." Baking cut-up birds in a dripping-pan suited the cast-iron ranges of the period, and the flour dredge plus repeated butter basting gave the browning. The cream-enriched gravy built from the pan fat and homemade chicken stock is characteristic of the approach -- measured, proportioned, and assuming the reader already has a stockpot going somewhere in the kitchen.