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Chicken Pot-Pie
I chicken
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk
Salt and pepper
Clean, singe and cut up the chicken, place it in a pot and nearly cover with water. Cover the pot and simmer gently. An old fowl will require at least three or four hours' slow cooking, but a year-old chicken should be done in one and one-half hours. Remove the cover during the last half-hour of cooking, to reduce the gravy to about one and one-half pints when done. Three-fourths of an hour before time to serve, make dumplings, add to the chicken and cover. When the dumplings are done and ready to serve, add salt and pepper to the chicken and make the gravy by adding to the liquor in the kettle three tablespoons of flour stirred to a paste in one cup of milk. Skim out the chicken, lay it on a platter, place the dumplings on the top and pour over them the gravy.
A stewed fowl with dumplings dropped in at the end — no pastry, despite the name. The ingredient list is short because it assumes you already have a dumpling recipe from elsewhere in the book.
- The missing ingredientThe list covers only the chicken and the gravy. You need a separate drop-dumpling batter: roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon fat and about 3/4 cup milk, mixed to a stiff dough.
- "Clean, singe and cut up"Singeing burned off the hair-like pinfeathers left after plucking. A supermarket bird needs none of this; buy a 4-5 lb chicken cut into eight pieces, or a whole one you joint yourself.
- Old fowl versus chickenThe three-to-four-hour bird is a spent laying hen, tough and full of collagen and flavour. What you will actually find is a young broiler, killed at a few weeks rather than a year, and it will be tender in about 1 to 1 1/2 hours of gentle simmering — closer to the recipe's shorter time than its longer one.
- Simmer, do not boilThis is the hinge. A rolling boil turns the breast meat stringy and clouds the liquor into something that will never make a clean gravy. Keep it at a bare tremble, with the surface barely moving.
- One and a half pintsThree cups of liquid. Uncovering the pot for the last half-hour to reduce is a real instruction, not filler — too much liquor and three tablespoons of flour will not thicken it.
- Three-quarters of an hour for dumplingsNote that this is counted from before you start mixing, so it is not all cooking time; even so it allows longer than needed. Baking-powder dumplings dropped on simmering liquid are cooked through in 15 to 20 minutes covered; longer and they slump into paste. Resist lifting the lid while they steam.
- Thickening the gravyThe raw flour-and-milk paste needs a couple of minutes at a simmer, stirred, or it will taste of flour. Add it to the pot liquor after the chicken and dumplings are out, and skim the fat first if the bird was rich.
- YieldA 4-5 lb chicken with a full batch of dumplings serves five or six.
Chicken pot-pie in nineteenth-century American usage often meant exactly this — a fowl stewed in its own liquor with dough cooked in the steam above it, no baked crust involved. The Pennsylvania German bot boi, made with flat noodle squares rather than raised dumplings, belongs to the same family and is often credited with keeping the crustless sense of the word alive in that region. The recipe's careful distinction between an old fowl and a year-old chicken reflects a period when many birds came from a household or local flock, so their age was known: hens went into the pot when they stopped laying, which is why the timing runs to four hours. The terse ingredient list assumes a cook who already had a dumpling batter by heart.