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Roast Chicken
Dress, clean, stuff, and truss a chicken. Place on its back on rack in a dripping-pan, rub entire surface with salt, and spread breast and legs with three tablespoons butter, rubbed until creamy and mixed with two tablespoons flour. Dredge bottom of pan with flour. Place in a hot oven, and when flour is well browned, reduce the heat, then baste. Continue basting every ten minutes until chicken is cooked. For basting, use one-fourth cup butter, melted in two-thirds cup boiling water, and after this is gone, use fat in pan, and when necessary to prevent flour burning, add one cup boiling water. During cooking, turn chicken frequently, that it may brown evenly. If a thick crust is desired, dredge bird with flour two or three times during cooking. If a glazed surface is preferred, spread bird with butter, omitting flour, and do not dredge during baking. When breast meat is tender, bird is sufficiently cooked. A four-pound chicken requires about one and one-half hours. Powdered sage, summer savory, or marjoram.
Stuffing I 1 cup cracker crumbs 1/3 cup boiling water 1/3 cup butter
A butter-and-flour crust method that predates reliable oven thermostats, which is why so much of the instruction is about watching the flour rather than watching the clock. It works well today with a few translations.
- "Dress, clean, truss"Dressing meant killing and plucking; cleaning meant drawing the bird and removing the pin feathers, lungs and oil sac. A supermarket chicken arrives at the trussing stage — tie the legs together and pin the wings to the body so the bird browns evenly.
- Oven temperatures'Hot oven' in period usage corresponds roughly to 425-450F; the book itself gives no dial setting. Start there and, as the recipe directs, reduce to about 350F once the flour paste is well browned rather than by the clock.
- Judge doneness by temperature"When breast meat is tender" is a poor gauge. Take the thigh to 165F at the joint, away from the bone; a 4 lb bird will need roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours in total, close to the book's estimate.
- The butter-flour pasteThree tablespoons butter creamed with two tablespoons flour is the hinge of the whole method. It sets into a crust that holds the basting liquid against the skin. If you want skin without the flour crust, take the alternative given at the end — what the recipe calls a glazed surface: butter only, no dredging.
- Basting liquidA quarter cup butter in two-thirds cup boiling water is about 7 oz of liquid, enough for the first stretch of ten-minute bastings. Basting that often costs you oven heat; every fifteen minutes is plenty, and the crust does most of the work anyway.
- Turning the birdFrequent turning made sense in an unevenly heated range. In a modern oven, roast breast-up throughout and rotate the pan once. Handling a hot, stuffed bird repeatedly is more risk than the browning is worth.
- Stuffing safetyStuffing inside the cavity must also reach 165F, which usually means overcooking the breast. Bake the cracker stuffing separately in a dish, moistened with some of the pan drippings.
- Cracker crumbsThe recipe specifies only 'cracker crumbs'; in this period that would have meant a plain cracker rather than a sweet or seasoned one. The ingredient list is cut short in the text reproduced here, so the remaining seasonings are missing.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a 4 lb bird will generally serve four, or five with the stuffing and gravy from the floured pan.
Fannie Farmer's roast chicken belongs to the era just before the thermostat, when oven heat was often judged by how quickly a sheet of paper scorched, which is why the instruction here is to watch the dredged flour rather than a dial. The butter-and-flour coating is an old English roasting habit carried into the American kitchen — turning before an open fire made a crust that held basting fat, and the practice survived the move indoors to the closed range. The Boston Cooking School is often credited with fixing quantities to it, right down to the two-thirds cup of boiling water, part of the school's broader project of turning inherited kitchen judgment into measurable, teachable steps.