Home › Poultry and Game › Oast Chicken, with Giblet Sauce
Oast Chicken, with Giblet Sauce
Prepare this the same as roast turkey, using but half the amount of stuffing, and allowing but fifteen minutes cooking to a pound. Baste well every ten minutes, else the chicken will be dry and disappointing. Chickens may be filled with chestnut stuffing the same as turkeys.
A shorthand entry that assumes you have already read the roast turkey recipe a few pages earlier. The two things it does give you — half the stuffing and fifteen minutes to the pound — are both worth a second look.
- The title is a typographical slip"Oast Chicken" is a dropped R for "Roast Chicken." Nothing to do with oast houses or hop drying.
- Set the oven at 350FThe book gives no temperature at all, here or by implication; a steady moderate oven is the usual modern equivalent for this style of roasting. A hotter start of 425F for the first twenty minutes gives better skin, then drop back.
- Fifteen minutes to the pound is generousFifteen minutes to the pound is tight -- the book's arithmetic gives one hour for a 4 lb bird, and a stuffed bird will run longer than that. Cook to temperature rather than to the clock: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- Stuffing inside the bird needs its own readingIf you fill the cavity, the centre of the stuffing must also reach 165F. This is the usual reason a stuffed roast overshoots on the breast; stuffing baked separately in a dish avoids the conflict entirely.
- Basting every ten minutes is optional nowRepeated oven-opening costs more heat than the basting returns, and modern birds are not the lean farmyard fowl the book had in mind. Butter or oil rubbed under the skin, plus a rest of fifteen minutes before carving, does more for moisture than frequent basting.
- The giblet sauceThe title promises it but the text does not describe it. A method along the usual lines: simmer the neck, heart and gizzard (not the liver, which turns bitter with long cooking) in salted water for an hour, chop the meat fine, and use the strained broth to make gravy from the pan drippings and flour, adding the chopped giblets at the end.
- Chestnut stuffingChestnuts were a seasonal autumn market item and had to be shelled and peeled at home. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are the practical modern substitute; roughly 1 lb suits a chicken-sized quantity, crumbled rather than pureed.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb roasting chicken with stuffing serves four to six.
The Butterick Cook Book belongs to a publishing house better known for dress patterns and The Delineator magazine, and it is written for the same audience: a household running on a budget with one servant or none. That explains the entry's extreme compression — it exists only to tell you how roast chicken differs from the roast turkey already described, and nothing else. The half-quantity of stuffing and the shorter minutes-per-pound are the whole content. Roast chicken in the early 1900s was still closer to a Sunday event than a weeknight staple; broiler production had not yet industrialised, and a bird bought for roasting was an older, tougher, leaner animal than anything sold today. Hence the insistence on basting every ten minutes, advice that made real sense for a fowl with almost no subcutaneous fat and reads as fussy overwork applied to a modern supermarket chicken. Chestnut stuffing, offered here as an upgrade, was a mark of a good table throughout the period, when American chestnuts were still abundant — the blight that destroyed them was identified in New York only a few years before this book appeared.