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Boiled Chicken with Onions
Take a young, fat chicken, singe, draw and truss it for boiling; put it into a buttered saucepan with a pint of white broth, sprinkle a little salt and pepper over, place the pan over a moderate fire and cook gently for thirty minutes. Blanch one pound of small onions, place them in the pan with the chicken and cook gently for thirty minutes longer. Whilst the chicken is cooking, it should be turned two or three times. Pour the broth and onions over, and serve.
A braise rather than a true boil: a pint of broth in a covered pan steams and poaches the bird rather than submerging it. The technique is sound, but the timings assume a smaller, younger chicken than most supermarkets sell.
- The birdA "young, fat chicken" points to a tender roasting bird rather than a stewing hen; something in the region of 3 to 3½ lb suits the timings given. Singeing and drawing are done for you; trussing is still worth doing so the legs do not splay and cook faster than the breast.
- White brothA pale unroasted veal or chicken stock, made from bones that were blanched rather than browned. Any good unsalted chicken stock works; avoid dark roasted stock, which will muddy the colour the dish depends on.
- A pintOscar's pint is 16 fl oz. With a modern bird it will not cover the chicken, which is the intent — keep the lid on and turn the bird as directed so the exposed side does not dry.
- Cover the panThe recipe does not say so, but a buttered pan with a pint of liquid over a moderate fire only works covered. Uncovered, the liquid reduces away well before the hour is up.
- Blanching the onionsSmall onions means pearl or pickling onions, about an inch across. Blanching loosens the skins and takes the raw edge off; drop them in boiling water a minute, drain, and slip off the skins before they go into the pan.
- Total time and donenessSixty minutes total suits a 3 lb bird. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thigh joint reading 165F rather than the clock, and add ten to fifteen minutes for a 4 lb chicken.
- The broth at the endWhat is poured over is unthickened cooking liquor, not a sauce. Skim the fat, taste for salt after the reduction, and if you want body, lift the chicken and onions and boil the liquid down by a third.
- YieldServes four, carved at the table with the onions and broth spooned over. Boiled or steamed potatoes go well alongside and soak up the liquor.
Boiled fowl was a fixture of nineteenth-century American and English tables, valued precisely because it was plain: the flavour came from the broth, the garnish and whatever sauce the kitchen sent with it. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, was not a chef and did not cook professionally, but his 1896 Cook Book collected the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen, and the boiled chicken section appears to offer a series of closely related entries distinguished largely by their accompaniment: with rice, with celery, with onions. That kind of variation-by-garnish is often associated with the classical brigade system, where a base preparation was said to be held and finished to order. Small onions cooked alongside the bird also point to the older English tradition of boiled fowl with onion sauce, a pairing generally traced back well before the hotel era.