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Jellied Chicken
Dress, clean, and cut up a four-pound fowl. Put in a stewpan with two slices onion, cover with boiling water, and cook slowly until meat falls from bones. When half cooked, add one-half tablespoon salt. Remove chicken; reduce stock to three-fourths cup, strain, and skim off fat. Decorate bottom of a mould with parsley and slices of hardboiled eggs. Pack in meat freed from skin and bone and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Pour on stock and place mould under heavy weight. Keep in a cold place until firm. In summer it is necessary to add one teaspoon dissolved granulated gelatine to stock.
A pressed chicken loaf that sets on its own collagen, with gelatine only as insurance. The whole thing hinges on reducing the stock hard enough that it gels without help.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA fowl meant an older laying hen — tough, gelatinous, deeply flavoured, and today usually sold as a stewing hen, often from halal or Asian butchers or a farm supplier. A 4 lb supermarket chicken works but its stock is thinner; you may well need the gelatine year-round.
- "Dress and clean"Plucking, singeing and drawing the bird. Any modern chicken arrives dressed; you only need to joint it.
- The reduction is the recipeThree-quarters of a cup of stock from a whole fowl is a serious reduction, and that concentration of collagen is what makes the loaf slice. Chill a spoonful on a saucer to test: if it does not set firm, reduce further or add gelatine.
- Gelatine amountOne teaspoon of granulated gelatine is a little under half a modern 1/4-oz envelope (about 2 1/4 teaspoons). Bloom it in a tablespoon of cold water, then stir into the hot stock off the heat.
- Cooking timeSimmering until the meat falls from the bone takes 2 to 3 hours for a stewing hen, 1 to 1 1/2 hours for a young chicken. Keep it at a bare tremble; a rolling boil clouds the stock and you want it clear for the decorated top.
- Mould and weightA loaf tin lined with plastic wrap unmoulds cleanly. For the weight, a second tin filled with cans works; press only enough to compact the meat, not enough to squeeze the stock out.
- "A cold place" means the refrigeratorThis is fully cooked meat in a moist, low-acid setting, so it needs 40F or below, not a cool larder. Chill at least 6 hours, and eat within three days.
- Yield and servingA 4 lb bird gives about six to eight servings. Slice cold, half an inch thick, with mustard, pickles or a salad; it is a luncheon and supper dish, not a hot one.
Pressed and jellied meats were a standing feature of the American cold table well before refrigeration was general — they used up an old boiling fowl, kept for several days in a cool cellar, and sliced neatly for luncheon, picnic baskets and Sunday supper when the kitchen fire was down. The decorated mould, with parsley and rings of hard-boiled egg laid in the bottom so they appear on top when turned out, follows the same aspic logic that governed everything from calf's foot jelly to the later tomato salads: a dish was expected to look composed. The note that gelatine becomes necessary "in summer" is a reminder that the book was written for kitchens whose cold storage was a cellar, an icebox or a north-facing shelf, and that a stock strong enough to set in January might slump in July.