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Chicken Fricassee
Dress, clean, and cut up a fowl. Put in a kettle, cover with boiling water, and cook slowly until tender, adding salt to water when chicken is about half done. Remove from water, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter or pork fat. Arrange chicken on pieces of dry toast placed on a hot platter, having wings and second joints opposite each other, breast in centre of platter, and drumsticks crossed just below second joints. Pour around White or Brown Sauce. Reduce stock to two cups, strain, and remove the fat. Melt three tablespoons butter, add four tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one and one-half cups stock. Just before serving, add one-half cup cream, and salt and pepper to taste; or make a sauce by browning butter and flour and adding two cups stock, then seasoning with salt and pepper. Fowls, which are always made tender by long cooking, are frequently utilized in this way. If chickens are employed, they are sautéd without previous boiling, and allowed to simmer fifteen to twenty minutes in the sauce.
A two-stage method: the bird is simmered to tenderness, then browned, and the cooking liquid becomes the sauce. Most of the translation work here is vocabulary and the choice of bird.
- "Fowl" versus "chicken"A fowl is a mature laying hen, tough and full of flavour, needing long moist cooking; the book's "chicken" is a young broiler. Supermarket chicken behaves like the latter, so follow the final sentence: sauté the pieces first, then simmer them 15 to 20 minutes in the sauce. A stewing hen, if you can find one, wants 1½ to 2½ hours of bare simmering.
- "Dress and clean"Plucking, singeing and drawing the bird. Any modern chicken arrives at this stage already; simply joint it into two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs and a split breast.
- "Second joint"The thigh. The platter instructions are a carving diagram in words, reassembling the bird's anatomy so a server at the table knows where each piece is without turning it over.
- Salting the water halfwayThe book gives no reason for this; the practice is usually explained by a belief that early salting toughens meat and draws out juices. It does no harm, but salting from the start seasons the meat more evenly and improves the stock.
- The sauce ratioThree tablespoons butter to four tablespoons flour to 1½ cups stock makes a thick velouté rather than a pouring sauce, and the half cup of cream at the end brings it to about two cups of finished sauce. If it sets too stiff, loosen it with the remaining reduced stock.
- Cook the rouxGive the butter and flour two or three minutes over low heat before the stock goes in, whisking, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. For the brown version, take the roux to the colour of peanut butter, which takes closer to eight minutes and thickens less per spoonful.
- Reducing the stockTwo cups is the target; the white sauce takes only 1½ of them, the brown alternative all two. Strain through a fine sieve and skim thoroughly, or chill briefly and lift the fat off in a cake.
- Pork fatRendered salt pork or bacon fat, still worth using for the browning if you have it. Butter alone will darken quickly at the heat needed, so use clarified butter or a mix of butter and a neutral oil.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb bird serves four to six. The toast is structural as much as anything, soaking up the sauce, so cut it thick and dry it well in the oven rather than toasting it soft.
Fricassee comes from the French fricasser, a verb covering meat cut up and cooked in its own sauce, and by the eighteenth century the dish was thoroughly domesticated in English and American kitchens — divided, as the cookbooks of the period had it, into white fricassee thickened with cream and brown fricassee built on a darkened roux. Fannie Farmer's version preserves both, and the frank remark that "fowls, which are always made tender by long cooking, are frequently utilized in this way" points to the economics behind it: a hen past laying was cheap, tough and flavourful, and the fricassee was the standard way of turning her into something a household could put on a platter. The elaborate arrangement of wings, thighs and crossed drumsticks belongs to the same era's expectation that a dish arrive at table looking composed, ready for a server to portion it without hunting for the pieces.