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Chicken Fricassee
Clean and disjoint chicken. Wipe each piece. Put in pot, cover with boiling water and simmer till tender. To the liquor add one cup or more hot milk, thicken with barley flour dissolved in cold water. Season well, boil for a few minutes. Serve with dumplings or biscuit.
A plain white fricassee: the bird is simmered, the broth becomes the sauce, and nothing is browned. The recipe assumes you know how long a chicken takes and how much thickening a quart of liquid wants, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hingeSimmer, never boil. A rolling boil toughens the breast and clouds the liquor, which here becomes the sauce and wants to stay clean. Hold it at a bare tremble with the lid ajar.
- TimingA 4-5 lb bird, disjointed, needs about 50-70 minutes at a simmer; an older stewing hen can take two hours. Test the thigh joint rather than watching the clock, and lift the breast pieces out early if they finish first.
- How much water"Cover with boiling water" means barely cover, roughly 6 cups for a cut-up chicken. Any more and you will have a weak broth that needs reducing before it will make sauce.
- Barley flourStill sold in health-food and baking aisles. It thickens a little less firmly than wheat flour and gives a slightly nutty, softly set sauce. Wheat flour or cornstarch will substitute; use about 4 tablespoons wheat flour, or about 2 tablespoons cornstarch, slurried in cold water for each quart of liquid.
- Adding the slurryWhisk it into the simmering liquor in a thin stream, then let it cook two or three minutes. Barley and wheat flour both taste raw and pasty if pulled off the heat immediately; the "boil for a few minutes" in the original is doing real work.
- Season wellUnhelpfully vague, and the sauce needs it. Salt generously, plenty of white pepper, and a grating of nutmeg or a bay leaf in the pot are period-appropriate. Lemon juice at the end lifts the whole thing.
- YieldOne chicken with dumplings feeds four to six. If serving over biscuit, split them in the bowl and ladle over.
A fricassee is defined by what it is not: the pieces are cooked in liquid rather than roasted, and in the white version they are never browned first, which is why the sauce stays pale and the dish reads as invalid food as much as dinner. The name comes through French, where fricasser is often glossed as to cut up and cook in a pan, though the word's origin is uncertain and it has also been explained as a compound of frire and casser; the explicit division into white and brown fricassees is characteristically eighteenth-century, appearing in Glasse and after. By the time bride's cook books appeared around 1900 the form had become thoroughly domestic American: boiled fowl, milk-thickened gravy, dumplings or split biscuit underneath. The barley flour is the telling detail here. Wheat flour was the default thickener, so specifying barley points either to the period's interest in cereal flours as gentle, digestible foods or to what happened to be in the pantry.