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Chicken Pot-Pie
Cut the chicken into pieces, as for a fricassee.
Place it in a pot with enough water to reach nearly to the top of the meat; cover the pot and simmer gently. An old fowl will require at least two hours' cooking, but a year-old chicken should be done in one and one-half hour. Remove the cover during the last half hour of boiling to reduce the gravy to about one and one-half pint when done. Three-quarters of an hour before dinner time make the crust as follows: One pint of flour; one-half tablespoon of lard; one teaspoon of baking-powder; one teaspoon of salt; sweet milk. Rub the flour and lard together until well mixed, having added the salt and baking-powder to the flour. Add enough milk to moisten the flour, roll out the dough an inch thick and cut out as for biscuit. Put the pieces of paste on a plate. Set the plate in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water, and steam for one-half hour. It is not wise to steam the paste over the chicken, as the rapid boiling required would reduce the gravy too much. When the balls of paste are done and ready to serve, add salt and pepper to the chicken, and thicken the gravy slightly with two and one-half tablespoons of flour stirred to a paste in one cup of milk. Skim out the chicken, lay it on a platter, strew with the paste balls, and pour over the whole, gravy from the kettle. To make the paste with sour milk omit the baking-powder, using instead a small teaspoon of soda. Dissolve the soda in a little cold water, add it to one cup of sour milk, and moisten the flour with this, adding more milk as needed. If very rich sour cream is to be used, omit the lard, adding the soda as for sour milk.
A stewed fowl with steamed biscuit dumplings rather than a baked pastry lid. The recipe is sound; most of what needs translating is the vocabulary and the bird itself.
- Steam the dumplings apart from the potThis is the instruction the recipe itself argues for, and it is worth following. Dumplings cooked on the stew demand a hard boil that drives off the liquid, and here the gravy is deliberately held at about three cups. A plate of biscuit rounds in a steamer basket over boiling water, covered, for 30 minutes gives the same result without touching the braise.
- "An old fowl"A stewing hen — a laying bird past production, tough, dark-fleshed and full of collagen. Supermarkets rarely stock them; a farm or halal butcher may. A standard 4-5 lb supermarket chicken corresponds to the "year-old chicken" and will be tender in about an hour to an hour and a half of bare simmering, not longer.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume: one pint is two cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. Two cups of flour with one teaspoon of baking powder is on the shy side by modern proportions; two teaspoons gives a lighter dumpling.
- Sweet milk and sour milkSweet milk is simply fresh milk. Sour milk is naturally clabbered raw milk, which today's pasteurised milk will not reproduce safely — use buttermilk instead, with the teaspoon of soda dissolved in a little water as directed. The sour-cream variant assumes a thick, high-fat farm cream; crème fraîche is the nearest thing.
- LardHalf a tablespoon to two cups of flour is a very lean biscuit by any standard. Two to three tablespoons of lard, butter or shortening, rubbed in cold, makes a dumpling that holds together better in the steam and tastes of something.
- Rolled an inch thickThat is thicker than a modern biscuit. Cut small, around 2 inches across, so the centres cook through in the half hour.
- The finishing gravyTwo and a half tablespoons of flour slaked in a cup of milk, stirred into three cups of hot broth, gives a light sauce rather than a thick one. Add it in a stream with the pot at a simmer and cook two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bird with about a dozen dumplings serves four to six.
Chicken pot-pie in nineteenth-century American usage often meant no pie at all: the "crust" was dough dropped, laid or steamed over a stewed fowl, closer to what is now usually called chicken and dumplings. Pennsylvania German cookery kept a related version with flat noodle-like squares of dough, and the name travelled with the dish long after the pastry case disappeared from it. The Butterick book was published by the pattern company for a broad household readership, and is writing for a kitchen where a hen might be retired from the yard rather than bought jointed, hence the frank warning that an old fowl needs two hours. The alternative leavenings — baking powder, or soda with sour milk, or soda with rich sour cream — reflect a period when a household might have any one of the three on hand.