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Boiled Chicken with Rice
Singe, draw and truss a chicken and boil it for fifteen minutes; add one onion stuck with three cloves, one saltspoonful each of salt and pepper and a bunch of sweet herbs. Take out the onions and herb and put in a breakfast cupful of well washed rice and boil until the rice is tender; dish the fowl, add a teacupful of gravy or stock to the liquor in which it was boiled; pour the gravy and rice around the fowl, and serve.
A plain poached fowl, written for a cook who already knew how long a bird takes. The times in the original are stage cues rather than a full schedule.
- The hinge: keep it below a boilDespite the word "boil" throughout, the water should sit at a bare shiver, 180-185F, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil shreds the breast and clouds the liquor you are going to serve as gravy.
- The fifteen minutes is not the cooking timeThat first quarter hour only brings the bird up and lets you skim. A 4-5 lb chicken needs roughly 60-75 minutes total at a simmer, until the thigh joint moves freely and the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F.
- Singe, draw and trussA supermarket bird arrives drawn and largely free of pin feathers, so this reduces to pulling out any giblet packet, checking the cavity, and tying the legs and wings close with kitchen twine so the bird holds its shape in the pot.
- Old measuresA saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon. A breakfast cupful is a large cup, near 8-10 fl oz of rice by volume; a teacupful is smaller, about 3/4 cup. The quarter teaspoon each of salt and pepper is seasoning for the bird, not for gallons of water — salt the cooking liquid properly on top of it.
- Sweet herbsA bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf, tied so it lifts out whole. Nothing sweet-tasting is meant; 'sweet' here is usually taken to mean fragrant, and the phrase is often said to have marked off culinary herbs from medicinal ones, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented.
- Rice timingLong-grain rice wants 15-18 minutes in the broth, so add it toward the end rather than the moment the aromatics come out, or it will be mush by the time the bird is done. Use a bird's worth of liquid only — rice cooked in a deep stockpot of water is just boiled rice.
- The gravyThe "gravy or stock" is there to loosen the reduced liquor. Skim the fat off the surface before pouring, and taste for salt at that point; poaching liquid always needs more than it seems.
- YieldA 4-5 lb chicken with a cup of rice serves four generously, five at a stretch. The remaining broth is worth keeping.
Boiled fowl was the quiet backbone of nineteenth-century cookery on both sides of the Atlantic: the treatment for an older, tougher bird, for invalids, and for anyone who wanted meat without a roasting fire. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a very large cookbook in 1896 that mixed hotel-scale showpieces with domestic plain cooking of exactly this kind, and the presence of a dish this modest among the sauces and garnishes says something about what New York diners actually ate. The formula is close to French poule au riz and to the English boiled fowl with rice found in Victorian household manuals, where the rice serves double duty as starch and as a way of using the cooking liquor rather than pouring it away. The instruction to stud an onion with cloves is older still, a standard flavouring for white stocks and broths that appears in English recipe books long before the hotel era.