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Boiled Chicken
Clean, wash and stuff as for roasting.
Baste a floured cloth around each, and put into a pot with enough boiling water to cover them well. The hot water cooks the skin at once, and prevents the escape of the juices. The broth will not be so rich as if the fowls are put on in cold water, but this is proof that the meat will be more nutritious and better flavored. Stew very slowly, for the first half hour especially. Boil an hour or more, guiding yourself by size and toughness. Serve with egg.
A plain nineteenth-century method for poaching a whole stuffed fowl, written for a cook who already knows what egg sauce is. Two things need translating: the floured cloth and the vague final instruction.
- The floured clothA clean cotton or linen cloth was rubbed with flour and basted (tacked with loose stitches) or tied around the bird, the intention being that the skin stayed pale and unbroken and the stuffing stayed put; the flour was understood to form a light paste that closed up the weave. Cheesecloth secured with butcher's twine does much the same job.
- Hot water in, and whyThe claim that boiling water "prevents the escape of the juices" is period folklore rather than food science, but the practical effect is real enough: a hot start firms the surface proteins quickly and gives cleaner-looking meat and a thinner broth. Starting in cold water draws more into the liquid, which is what you want if the broth is the point.
- "Stew very slowly" is the hingeDespite the word "boil," the water should never move above a bare shiver, around 180F. A rolling boil shreds the breast and toughens the leg meat before the thighs are done.
- Timing and donenessAn hour suits a small bird; a 4-5 lb chicken wants closer to 75-90 minutes at a slow simmer. Cook to 165F in the thigh, and check the stuffing separately, since a wet-cooked bird heats its cavity slowly and the stuffing is the last thing to come up to temperature.
- Stuffing a boiled birdIf the stuffing lags behind the meat, cook it in a separate covered dish rather than pushing the whole bird past done waiting for the centre. Many cooks now poach the chicken empty for this reason.
- "Serve with egg"This means egg sauce: a white sauce of butter, flour and milk (or some of the poaching broth) with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in, seasoned with salt, pepper and often a scrape of nutmeg. It was the standard accompaniment to boiled fowl and boiled fish alike.
- The cooking liquidEven the "not so rich" broth is worth keeping. Strain it, chill it, lift the fat, and use it for the sauce or for soup the next day.
- YieldOne 4-5 lb bird serves four to six with the sauce and a starch.
Boiled fowl was the everyday counterpart to the roast in English and American kitchens: it needed no oven, only a pot on the range, and it rescued older or tougher birds that would have gone leathery under dry heat. The egg sauce that finishes it here is a survival of an older English pairing \em bound in butter sauce, served with boiled chicken, boiled fish and salt cod well before this book was printed. The argument in the recipe, that searing the outside "seals in the juices" and so makes the meat more nutritious while thinning the broth, was near-universal cookbook doctrine in the second half of the nineteenth century; it is conventionally attributed to the German chemist Justus von Liebig, though the attribution is a convention rather than a documented lineage, and his theories about meat extractives were popularised in kitchen manuals long after chemists had abandoned them. Such received wisdom travels well: compact, confident, and passed on without a source.