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Chicken Stew
Dress, clean, and cut up a fowl. Put in a stewpan, cover with boiling water, and cook slowly until tender, adding one-half tablespoon salt and one-eighth teaspoon pepper when fowl is about half cooked. Thicken stock with onethird cup flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Serve with Dumplings. If desired richer, butter may be added.
A plain stewed fowl, written for a cook who could buy an old laying hen and expect to simmer it for hours. The method still works; the bird has changed.
- "Dress and clean"This meant pluck, singe the pinfeathers, draw the entrails and remove the head and feet. A supermarket chicken arrives at the point where the recipe becomes useful; simply cut it into eight or ten pieces.
- A "fowl" is not a broilerIn this period a fowl generally meant a mature stewing hen, often in the 4-6 lb range, tough enough to need something like two to three hours. A modern 4-5 lb chicken is tender in 60-90 minutes at a bare simmer, and breast meat will be dry well before that. If you can find a true stewing hen, it rewards the long cooking with far better stock.
- Cook slowly means barely bubblingThe hinge of the dish. A rolling boil shreds the meat and turns the broth cloudy and greasy; hold the water at a lazy simmer with the surface just trembling.
- Salting halfwayHalf a tablespoon of salt is modest for several quarts of liquid. Taste and adjust at the end, especially if you are reducing the stock or serving it as gravy over dumplings.
- The flour thickeningA third cup of flour slaked in cold water is a white wash, not a roux. Whisk it into the simmering stock in a thin stream and let it cook a full five minutes or the stew will taste of raw flour.
- Skim the fatAn older bird throws a good deal of fat. Skim it before thickening, or the finished sauce will break into a slick. The recipe does not say when the optional butter goes in; best stirred in after thickening, off the boil.
- DumplingsThe book's baking-powder dumplings are steamed on top of the stew with the lid on, roughly 12-15 minutes; keep it covered while they cook. Adding them after the stock is thickened lets them poach in sauce rather than thin broth.
- YieldNo yield is given; a 4-5 lb bird with dumplings should serve about five or six.
Stewed fowl with dumplings was the standard fate of a hen past laying, and versions of it appear in many nineteenth-century American cookbooks under one name or another. This version is notably bare: no aromatics, no herbs, not even an onion, which may reflect both the Boston Cooking School's teaching style and the assumption that a good old hen supplies its own flavor. The instruction to cover with boiling water is worth noting as a period doctrine; cooks were taught that boiling water seized the surface of the meat and kept the juices in, while cold water was reserved for making stock, where you wanted the flavor to leach out. The distinction between a fowl and a chicken was commercially real in this period and largely faded with the rise of the specialized broiler industry in the twentieth century, which is why a recipe this simple now needs more explanation than it once did.