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Baked Chicken (Take a plump chicken dress)
Take a plump chicken, dress and lay in cold salt water for half hour, put in pan, stuff and sprinkle with salt and pepper; lay a few slices of fat pork. Cover and bake until tender, with a steady fire.
Baste often. Turn so as to have uniform heat.
A skeletal recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew the dish: no oven temperature, no time, no stuffing formula. The essentials are the covered pan, the pork fat over the breast, and frequent basting.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives neither. "A steady fire" in a wood or coal range asks for constant, even heat rather than a particular temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. A 4-5 lb bird, covered, will take roughly 1 1/2 hours; uncover for the last 20 minutes to brown.
- "Dress"In period usage this meant pluck, singe off the pin feathers, draw the innards and truss. A supermarket bird arrives dressed; you need only remove the giblet packet, pat dry and tie the legs.
- The salt-water soakHalf an hour in cold salt water would have served to clean the bird and to salt it lightly. It is optional now; a 30-minute soak in water with a tablespoon of salt per quart will season the surface a little. Dry the skin thoroughly afterward or it will not brown.
- Fat porkSliced salt pork or fatback, laid over the breast. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or a few strips of pork fat do the same job: they self-baste the lean breast while the thighs finish. Account for their salt before you season the bird.
- StuffingNo recipe is given, the compiler evidently assuming the reader had one; common period fillings were stale bread, butter, onion, sage or summer savory, moistened with stock. If you stuff the cavity, the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F, which usually means the bird runs to a longer time; cooking the dressing in a separate dish is faster and more reliable.
- Turning and bastingTurning existed because range ovens heated unevenly from one side. A modern oven does not require it, and turning a stuffed bird is awkward. Basting every 20 minutes is still worthwhile; more often than that mostly loses heat.
- DonenessCook to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone. "Until tender" was judged by a fork sliding in easily and the leg moving freely in its socket.
- YieldA 4-5 lb chicken with stuffing serves four to six.
Baked chicken rather than roast chicken is a telling detail: true roasting meant a spit before an open fire, while in a closed oven a covered pan trapped steam and kept a lean farmyard bird from drying out. The fat pork laid over the breast is the older technique of barding, standard whenever the meat itself carried little fat han laying hens or surplus cockerels, were leaner and tougher than anything sold today. The brevity is characteristic of much early cookery writing: such recipes served as memory aids for cooks who had watched the dish made, not instructions for beginners, which is why the stuffing is named but never specified.