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Chicken Fricassee
Cut the fowl in convenient pieces and sear each piece in a little hot fat in a frying-pan. Have a quart of boiling water in the pail of the cooker, put in the chicken, cover closely and set in the cooker for about five hours. If it seems at all tough, cooking may be hastened by putting it on the fire for the last half hour, or the pail may be again set on the stove, re-heated, and returned to the cooker.
Thicken the liquor, add cream, stir in some boiled rice, and serve around the chicken.
A retained-heat recipe: the food is brought to a boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box that holds the heat while the fire goes out. Everything about the method depends on how well that heat is kept.
- Holding temperature is the hingeA quart of water and a cut-up fowl is a modest amount of thermal mass, and in five hours an imperfectly insulated cooker will drift down through the range where bacteria multiply. If you want to reproduce this, use a modern slow cooker on low or a heavy covered pot in a 200-250F oven, both of which hold the food safely above 140F for the whole cook. A vacuum-insulated thermal cooker also works; a homemade hay- or newspaper-lined box does not reliably.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest with fitted wells, sometimes with soapstone or iron discs heated on the range and packed alongside the pail. It cooked nothing on its own -- it only slowed the loss of heat from food already boiling.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerThe book means a mature stewing hen, four to six pounds, tough enough to need hours of moist heat. Supermarket chicken is slaughtered young and will fall apart long before five hours. A stewing hen from a butcher or a farmers' market takes two and a half to three hours of gentle simmering; a standard 4 lb bird takes about an hour and a quarter.
- Sear in a proper panBrown the pieces hard in a heavy skillet and deglaze it with a little of the hot water, or the fond that carries most of the flavor stays behind in the frying-pan.
- Thickening the liquorNo proportions are given, and the recipe gives no way to know how much liquid you will have: a quart goes in, the pail is covered closely so little escapes, and the bird releases more. Work 3 tablespoons of butter into 3 tablespoons of flour for every three cups of liquid, whisk it in off the heat, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The cream goes in lastAdd about half a cup of heavy cream after the sauce has thickened and keep it below a boil. Light cream or half-and-half will curdle in an acidic or over-reduced sauce.
- The riceThe recipe gives no quantity; about a cup of raw rice, boiled separately and drained, suits the dish. Stirring it into the sauce as written makes a thick, homely dish; spooning the rice around the platter and the sauced chicken into the center gives a cleaner result.
- YieldA four- to five-pound fowl with rice serves four to six.
The fireless cooker was a brief but genuine enthusiasm of the years around 1900, promoted in domestic-science bulletins and women's magazines as a way to save fuel, keep the kitchen cool in summer, and let a cook leave the house with dinner underway. The principle is generally traced to the Norwegian hay box, in which a pot of boiling food was buried in insulating material; American versions were sold as furniture-like chests and were also widely built at home from a packing crate and packed hay, felt or crumpled newspaper. The dish chosen is a telling one -- fricassee, a meat cut up and stewed in its own sauce, was a common American treatment for an old laying hen past her useful life, a bird that needed exactly the long, low, unattended heat the cooker promised to supply for free.