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Braised Chicken
Dress, clean, and truss a four-pound fowl. Try out two slices fat salt pork cut one-fourth inch thick; remove scraps, and add to fat five slices carrot cut in small cubes, onehalf sliced onion, two sprigs thyme, one sprig parsley, and one bay leaf, then cook ten minutes; add two tablespoons butter, and fry fowl, turning often until surface is well browned. Place on trivet in a deep pan, pour over fat, and add two cups boiling water or Chicken Stock. Cover, and bake in slow oven until tender, basting often, and adding more water if needed. Serve with a sauce made from stock in pan, first straining and removing the fat.
A pot-roasted bird: browned in rendered pork fat with aromatics, then steamed and baked over liquid rather than sitting in it. The trivet is the point of the method and worth keeping.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300F. At that temperature a four-pound bird needs roughly two and a half to three hours; check the thigh joint for tenderness and an internal temperature of 165F at the thickest part.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA fowl in this period was a mature laying hen, tough and full of flavour, which is why the recipe simply says to bake until tender. A supermarket roasting chicken of the same weight will be tender in about half the time and can dry out; a stewing hen or an older free-range bird suits the method far better.
- Dress and cleanThis means pluck, singe and draw. A modern bird arrives ready; just remove the giblet packet, pat dry, and truss with kitchen twine so the legs and wings stay close to the body.
- Try out the porkCut the salt pork into small pieces and render it slowly over moderate heat until the fat runs and the solids are crisp. Those solids are the "scraps" to be removed. About two tablespoons of fat is what you are after; unsmoked bacon or pancetta substitutes acceptably.
- The trivetThe bird sits above the liquid, not in it, so the underside braises in steam while the top browns and bastes. A small wire rack, a folded fold of foil, or a bed of thick carrot slices does the same job in a Dutch oven.
- Basting and liquidTwo cups of water or stock will reduce over three hours. Check every forty minutes or so and top up so the pan never runs dry, which is where the sauce comes from.
- The sauceStrain the pan liquid, let it settle, and spoon or skim off the fat. The recipe does not say how to finish it; thickening with a butter-and-flour roux or simply reducing it hard both work.
- YieldA four-pound bird serves four to six, depending on whether it is carved onto plates or served with heavy sides.
Braising in the American sense meant cooking meat in a covered vessel with a little liquid, and some cookbooks specified a rack or trivet to keep the meat clear of the liquid so it would not simply boil. Fannie Farmer's readers were buying birds by category rather than age label: a broiler was young and small, a roasting chicken larger, and a fowl a mature hen past laying, cheap and tough and best handled with long moist heat. The salt pork is the older American cooking fat, said to have been kept in the pantry barrel and rendered as needed before commercial shortening and bottled oils displaced it; the carrot, onion, thyme, parsley and bay are the classic French aromatic base, a sign of how thoroughly the Boston Cooking School had absorbed continental technique and repackaged it in plain, measurable, teachable terms.