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Boiled Chicken Royal Style
Truss chicken and tie strips of bacon over the breast. Put into a kettle, cover with boiling water, season with salt and pepper, cover close and cook slowly until tender. Remove from water, drain, rub with mixture of creamed butter and barley flour and brown in the oven. Cool the liquor quickly and remove the fat, then reheat. To each pint of liquor allow one and one-half tablespoons corn starch.
Blend the corn starch in a little cold water, pour into the hot liquor and boil ten minutes. Then add one-half cup chopped mushrooms. When gravy is perfectly done, remove from fire, and to one pint of gravy add yolk of one egg, slightly beaten. Do not cook again after the yolk has been added, or it may curdle.
Serve gravy in boat.
A poached-then-browned chicken with a liaison-thickened gravy made from its own cooking liquor. The technique is sound; only the flours, the oven language and the egg finish need translating.
- The hinge: the yolk goes in off the heatThe recipe says it plainly and it is the one thing that will ruin the sauce. Beat the yolk with a few spoonfuls of the hot gravy first, then stir that back into the pan away from the burner. Above roughly 180F the yolk sets into threads and the gravy breaks.
- "Cook slowly" means poach, not boilHold the water at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, with the lid on. The recipe gives no bird size or time, only "until tender"; a 4-5 lb bird will generally want an hour and a half or so, and the thigh should read 165F with the leg moving freely.
- Barley flourStill sold in health-food shops and by mail; it browns quickly and gives a soft, slightly nutty crust. Plain all-purpose flour creamed into the butter works the same way if you cannot find it.
- Browning in the ovenNo temperature is given. Use 425F for 15-20 minutes, uncovered, turning the dish once, until the butter-and-flour coating is gold. Any hotter and the paste scorches before it colors evenly.
- Cornstarch proportionA pint is 2 cups, so 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch per 2 cups of liquor. Slake it in cold water before it meets anything hot. Ten minutes of boiling is longer than cornstarch needs and will thin a starch gel slightly; five is enough to cook out the raw taste.
- Cooling the liquor quicklyThe point is to set the fat so it lifts off in a sheet. A bowl of the strained broth in an ice bath does it in 20 minutes, or refrigerate it while the bird browns.
- The mushroomsChopped raw mushrooms dropped into the gravy will release water and dull the color. Sweat them in a little butter first, then stir them in.
- Bacon over the breastThis is barding, not flavoring in the modern sense. Use thin, unsmoked or lightly smoked slices tied on with kitchen twine; heavy smoke will carry through into the poaching liquor and therefore into the gravy.
- YieldThe recipe gives no bird size or liquor quantity. A chicken of the size assumed above will serve about four, with whatever gravy the strained liquor yields.
"Royal style" in Anglo-American cookbooks of this era is a loose rendering of the French a la reine or a la royale, terms that generally signaled a white poached fowl finished with a rich, pale sauce rather than any particular court dish. The method here is textbook nineteenth-century French practice worked into a domestic register: a bird gently poached, its broth degreased and thickened, then finished with a liaison of egg yolk, the classic warning against re-boiling included. What suggests a household book rather than a professional one is the browning step, since a true poached fowl would have been served pale, and the use of cornstarch.