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Roast Chicken
I roasting chicken
Salt and pepper
Stuffing
Flour
Savory fat or olive oil
Wash, singe and draw the fowl, rub it with salt and pepper inside and out, and stuff the fowl. (Any stuffing may be used. Bread stuffing, chestnut stuffing and celery stuffing are particularly good.) Truss and tie the fowl. Grease it well with savory fat or olive oil, dredge with flour and place it on a trivet in a double roasting-pan in a hot oven (480° Fahrenheit), to sear quickly so that its juices may not escape during the roasting. After twenty or twenty-five minutes, when the skin is well seared, cover the pan, lessen the heat to 370° and cook until the breast is tender. If cooked in an open pan, as soon as the flour has been nicely browned, baste well, adding a little fat or water if necessary, repeating the basting every ten minutes. Allow about twenty minutes to a pound for roasting. Serve with giblet sauce.
A straightforward high-heat sear followed by a lower roast, with two archaic assumptions worth translating: the bird itself and the roasting time.
- The hinge: sear, then drop the heatTwenty to twenty-five minutes at 480F sets the skin and browns the flour dredge; the drop to 370F does the actual cooking. Do not skip the drop, or the outside will be dark long before the thighs are done.
- "So that its juices may not escape"The searing-seals-in-juices idea is period belief, not fact. Searing is worth doing for colour and flavour, so follow the method as written, but expect it to change nothing about moisture.
- Twenty minutes to the pound is too longTwenty minutes to the pound is long by modern standards -- by that rule a 4-5 lb bird works out to roughly 80 to 100 minutes of roasting. Cook to temperature instead: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, which usually lands at 50-70 minutes total for a bird that size.
- A "roasting chicken"In period usage a young bird of roughly 3-1/2 to 5 lb, distinct from a fowl or stewing hen. A standard supermarket roaster is the right substitute; the recipe itself then calls the same bird "the fowl," using the word loosely.
- Double roasting-panA two-piece pan with a fitted cover. Any roasting pan with a rack works, with foil tented over it for the covered stage.
- Savory fatRendered poultry fat, lard or drippings. Butter browns faster than the recipe expects at 480F; oil or a rendered fat is closer to the intent.
- Stuffing and safetyStuffing inside the cavity must reach 165F as well, which is what pushes roasting times long. Baking the dressing separately gives a better bird and a better dressing.
- Giblet sauceNot given here. Simmer the neck, heart and gizzard with an onion while the bird roasts, chop the giblets fine, and thicken the strained broth with the pan drippings and flour.
- YieldA 4-5 lb roaster serves four to five.
The Butterick book gives two exact figures, 480F and 370F, where a Victorian cookbook would have said "a quick oven" and "moderate." The searing instruction reflects the then-dominant theory, generally traced to the nineteenth-century chemist Justus von Liebig, that a hardened crust locks juices inside the meat; it was accepted for decades before careful testing dismissed it. The suggested stuffings place the dish firmly in the autumn and winter table, chestnut in particular being a standard American holiday filling before the blight of the early twentieth century destroyed most of the country's chestnut trees and made imported nuts the only source.