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Blanketed Chicken
Split and clean two broilers. Place in dripping-pan and sprinkle with salt, pepper, two tablespoons green pepper finely chopped, and one tablespoon chives finely cut. Cover with strips of bacon thinly cut, and bake in a hot oven until chicken is tender. Remove to serving dish and pour around the following sauce:
To three tablespoons fat, taken from dripping-pan, add four tablespoons flour and one and one-half cups thin cream, or half chicken stock and half cream may be used. Season with salt and pepper.
A split-and-roasted chicken with bacon laid over it and a pan gravy made in the roasting pan. Straightforward once you translate the bird and the oven.
- What a broiler wasA broiler in this period was a very young chicken of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb, split down the back and opened flat. A modern equivalent is two small 2 lb birds or a pair of split Cornish hens, not the 5 lb roasters sold today.
- Hot oven"Hot" in books of this period generally means somewhere around 400-450F. That is right for small split birds -- it crisps the bacon and browns the skin in the time the meat needs. A larger bird at that heat will burn before the thigh is done.
- Timing and donenessNo time is given in the original. Small split chickens take about 35-45 minutes at 425F. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh: 165F.
- The bacon is the pointThe "blanket" of thinly sliced bacon bastes the lean young bird and renders the fat the sauce is built on. Use thin-cut streaky bacon, overlapped to cover the breast; thick-cut will not render in the time available and leaves the skin pale.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting pan or a half-sheet pan. Shallow matters -- deep sides steam the skin instead of roasting it. Set the birds skin side up, flat, not crowded.
- The sauceThree tablespoons fat to four tablespoons flour is a fairly stiff roux. Cook it in the pan on the stovetop for a minute or two before adding the liquid, and add the cream gradually while whisking or it will lump. If the pan drippings are heavily browned, scrape them in -- that is the flavor.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" is about 18-20 percent butterfat, closest to today's light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream will make the sauce too rich to pour around the chicken; the half stock, half cream option in the original is the better version.
- Chives and green pepperOne tablespoon of cut chives and two of finely chopped green bell pepper, scattered on the birds before the bacon goes on. Both are seasoning here, not garnish, and they end up in the pan fat that becomes the sauce.
"Blanketed" is simply descriptive -- the bird is covered over with bacon -- and it sits in a long European tradition of barding lean meat with sheets of fat or salt pork so it does not dry out, the same logic behind a barded pheasant or a larded fillet. The broiler itself is a marker of the period: purpose-raised young chickens for broiling and frying were becoming a distinct commercial product in the early twentieth century, and recipes of this vintage assume a small, tender, mild-flavored bird rather than the older stewing hen common in nineteenth-century poultry cookery. The finishing gravy, a roux made in the roasting pan and slackened with cream, is typical of Boston Cooking School-style American cookery.