Home › Poultry and Game › Boiled Chicken
Boiled Chicken
Chickens are boiled the same as turkeys.
In winter there is no better way than to boil them whole and pour over them parsley sauce or oyster sauce when serving. The chicken should be well secured in a wet cloth that has been generously sprinkled with flour; it is then plunged in boiling water, which should then gently simmer until the chicken is done. Allow twenty minutes cooking to a pound. A large tough chicken may be made very palatable, if prepared in this way.
A method rather than a formula: the whole bird is wrapped, poached and sauced. Two things in it need translating for a modern bird and a modern stove.
- The hinge: simmer, never boilAfter the plunge into boiling water the pot must drop to a bare shiver, around 180-185F, with only occasional bubbles breaking. A rolling boil shreds the breast and toughens the outside long before the thigh is done.
- The floured clothA clean, wet muslin or cheesecloth dusted heavily with flour was used to seal the skin, keep the bird pale and hold its shape. It works, but a doubled layer of cheesecloth tied with kitchen string is easier to handle than one large sheet, and trussing the legs first stops the whole parcel from sprawling.
- Twenty minutes to the poundThat timing assumes an old barnyard fowl. A 4 lb supermarket chicken cooked 80 minutes will be overdone; start checking at about 15 minutes per pound and pull it when the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F. A genuine stewing hen, which is what this instruction was written for, may well need the full time and more.
- "A large tough chicken"Most likely an older bird past its laying days rather than a young broiler. If you can find a stewing fowl at a butcher, this method is exactly right for it; a young roasting chicken needs less time and gains less from the treatment.
- The cooking waterSalt it as you would soup and add an onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns. Nothing in the recipe forbids it, and the resulting broth can be used to enrich or thin the parsley sauce.
- Oyster saucePeriod oyster sauce is a white sauce finished with shucked oysters and their liquor, not the bottled Cantonese condiment. Drop the oysters in off the heat for a minute or two until the edges just ruffle; longer and they turn to erasers.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bird serves four to six, plus whatever broth the pot yields.
Boiling was a standard treatment for a fowl that had outlived its usefulness in the henhouse, and before commercial broiler production reshaped the poultry trade in the twentieth century, older, harder-working birds were a common form of chicken on the American table. Long, gentle immersion breaks down the connective tissue that roasting only tightens, which is why the entry ends by promising that a large tough chicken can be made palatable. The floured cloth belongs to the same English tradition as the boiled pudding cloth, and its purpose seems to have been cosmetic as much as culinary, since a white, unbroken skin was taken as the mark of a properly boiled fowl. The brevity here is explained by the opening line: readers were expected to already know how a turkey was boiled, and the chicken entry simply points back to it.