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Boiled Fowl
Dress, clean, and truss a four-pound fowl, tie in cheese< cloth, place on trivet in a kettle, half surround with boiling water, cover, and cook slowly until tender, turning occasionally. Add salt the last hour of cooking. Serve with Egg, Oyster, or Celery Sauce. It is not desirable to stuff a boiled fowl.
This is less a boiled bird than a steamed one: the fowl sits on a trivet above water that only reaches halfway up, so the breast cooks in steam while the legs simmer. That detail is the whole method.
- What a "fowl" wasFowl meant a mature laying hen past her prime, with tough connective tissue and a great deal of flavor. A supermarket broiler is a young bird and will fall apart long before an hour is up. Look for a stewing hen or soup chicken, 4 to 5 lb, or accept that a roasting chicken needs far less time.
- Keep the water at half heightDo not submerge the bird. Half-surrounding it with boiling water and keeping the lid on gives you steam heat above and gentle simmer below, which is why the breast stays intact rather than shredding.
- "Cook slowly"Means a bare simmer, small bubbles at the edge of the pot, roughly 185-195F. A rolling boil toughens the muscle fibers and clouds whatever broth you hope to keep.
- TimeA true stewing hen wants 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours; a modern 4 lb chicken is done in 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Test the thigh joint, and take the thigh to at least 165F.
- The cheeseclothTie the trussed bird loosely in a doubled sheet of cheesecloth with the ends long enough to grip. It holds the skin and legs in place through the turning and gives you a handle for lifting a hot, slippery bird out whole.
- Salt at the endThe recipe adds salt only in the last hour and does not say why. Salting the water from the start seasons the flesh more evenly and does no harm at these temperatures.
- Don't waste the liquidWhat is left in the kettle is a light broth. Strain it and use it as the base for the egg, oyster, or celery sauce called for, whose recipes are given elsewhere in the book.
- YieldA 4 lb bird serves four to six with sauce and a starch, and the carcass will give you a second pot of stock.
Boiled fowl was the standard fate of a hen that had stopped laying, and it appears in Fannie Farmer's book alongside roast turkey and broiled squab because a nineteenth-century household kitchen dealt with whole animals at every stage of usefulness. Slow moist heat was among the surest ways to make an old bird pleasant, and the accompanying sauces — egg, oyster, celery — carried the seasoning that the plain meat lacked. A boiled fowl was left unstuffed, though the reasoning behind the rule is not spelled out in the recipes themselves. The dish faded as commercial broiler chickens, tender and young, became the default bird after the Second World War, taking with them both the tough hen and the technique it demanded.