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Baked Chicken (Dress clean and cut up two)
Dress, clean, and cut up two chickens.
Place in a dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour (barley flour) and dot over with butter substitute. Bake thirty minutes in a hot oven, basting every five minutes with butter substitute or drippings melted in one-quarter cup boiling water. Serve with gravy made by using fat in pan, onequarter cup substitute flour, one cup each of chicken stock and cream, and salt and pepper to taste.
A wartime roasting recipe written around substitutions: barley flour for wheat, margarine or drippings for butter. It works as written, but the timing assumes small birds and needs checking.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425F. At that heat the flour dredge sets and browns quickly, which is the point of the method.
- Thirty minutes is optimisticTwo chickens of the period might weigh 2 to 2.5 lb each; a modern bird is 4 lb or more. Cut-up pieces from supermarket chickens need 40 to 50 minutes, and the only reliable test is 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- Butter substituteIn 1917-18 this meant margarine, oleo, or rendered drippings, all conserved so that butter could go overseas. Any of them works; unsalted butter works better if you are not observing rationing.
- Barley flourAvailable in health-food aisles and from mills. It browns faster and darker than wheat flour and has almost no gluten, so the dredge crisps rather than forming a skin. Wheat flour is a direct swap by volume.
- Substitute flour in the gravyA quarter cup of barley or rye flour to two cups of liquid gives a fairly thick gravy. Low-gluten flours thicken less reliably than wheat, so cook the roux in the pan fat for a minute or two before adding stock, and expect a slightly grainy body.
- Basting every five minutesSix openings of the oven door in half an hour will cost you heat and time. Baste at fifteen and thirty minutes instead; the flour coating holds moisture better than bare skin does.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan or a rimmed half-sheet. The pieces should sit in one layer with space between them, or they steam.
- YieldTwo chickens, jointed, serve six to eight with the gravy.
The tell here is the parenthetical: flour (barley flour) and the repeated butter substitute. This points to American home cooking under the U.S. Food Administration's voluntary conservation campaign of 1917-18, when households were urged to observe wheatless and meatless days and to stretch or replace butter, wheat and sugar so that those staples could be shipped to Europe. Barley, oat, rye and corn flours were promoted as substitutes, and some cookbooks of the moment rewrote standard recipes around them. Baked chicken with pan gravy is about as plain as poultry cookery gets: no stuffing, no trussing, no roasting rack, just jointed birds, seasoning, a dredge and frequent basting.