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Boiled Chicken
Put one quart of broth into a stewpan over the stove, and when it boils put in a cleaned and trussed fowl or chicken and season with an onion, a bunch of sweet herbs and a little salt and pepper. When the fowl is done, dish it up, garnish with pieces of fried bacon, and serve with white sauce. Boiled Chickens, Providence Style Singe, draw and wipe two chickens, truss them from the wing to the leg with a needle, and boil them in a saucepan of broth for three-quarters of an hour. Prepare one pint of allemande sauce with the broth of a chicken, adding one teacupful each of finely cut boiled carrot and cooked lima beans or flageolets, and cook for three minutes longer. Dish up the fowls, untruss, pour over the sauce, arrange the vegetables on either side, and serve with chopped parsley sprinkled over.
Boiled Chickens, Royal Style Truss two chickens as for boiling, lard their breasts thoroughly and place them in a stewpan with stock up to the larding; then cover them over with a piece of buttered paper, put a tight-fitting lid on the pan and let them gently simmer until done. While they are cooking, cut a croustade of bread in the shape of a vase, and fry it; put this in the center of the dish, place the fowls on either side, garnish the dish with a garnishing of cockscombs, truffles, mushrooms and ham, cut in fancy shapes and pour over one pint of good white sauce, previously made hot. The croustade should have fine, ornamented, fancy skewers stuck in it, upon which may be arranged some of the pieces out of the garnishing, and two or three crayfish.
Three treatments of the same idea: a whole bird gently cooked in broth and dressed with a white sauce. The hinge is temperature — none of these should actually boil, and the stated times belong to smaller birds than we buy now.
- "Boil" means poachA hard boil shreds the breast and clouds the broth. Bring the liquid to a bare shiver, around 180-185F, and hold it there; the surface should barely move.
- The timing is short for modern birdsThree-quarters of an hour would suit a bird smaller than we buy now, perhaps 2-3 lb. A supermarket chicken of 4-5 lb needs roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter at a simmer, and should be checked to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh.
- A quart of broth will not cover a chickenThe first version assumes a deep, narrow stewpan and a small bird. Use a pot that fits the chicken snugly and add enough broth or water to come at least three-quarters of the way up; top up with water if you are short on stock.
- Fowl versus chickenA "fowl" is a mature laying hen — tough, deeply flavoured, and needing two hours or more. It is sold today as a stewing hen and is worth seeking out for the broth it leaves behind.
- Allemande sauceA velouté (chicken stock thickened with a blond roux) finished off the heat with egg yolks and cream and sharpened with lemon. Once the yolks go in it must not boil or it will curdle; a pint is about 2 cups.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green French shell beans, sold dried or tinned. Cooked lima beans are the alternative the recipe itself offers, and a teacupful is roughly three-quarters of a cup.
- Larding and the buttered paperLarding — threading strips of pork fat through the breast with a larding needle — compensates for a lean bird; bard the breast with sheets of fatback or thin bacon instead if you have no needle. The buttered paper is a cartouche laid directly on the surface to stop the exposed meat drying.
- The Royal garnishCockscombs are hard to come by today; truffles, mushrooms, ham and crayfish carry the dish. The croustade is a block of bread carved and fried, and it is decoration, not dinner.
- YieldThe first recipe serves 4; the two-chicken versions serve 6 to 8. Save the poaching liquid — it is the best part of the transaction.
Oscar Tschirky was never the Waldorf's chef; he was its ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel, and the 1896 book that carries his name is less a record of his own cooking than a compendium of the hotel's repertoire, set down at the moment American grand-hotel dining had fully absorbed French practice. That shows in these three entries. Boiled fowl was one of the plainest dishes in the nineteenth-century English and American kitchen — a hen, some broth, a white sauce — and what the Waldorf does is dress it in the codified garnitures of the professional French kitchen, where a dish's second name told the cook exactly which trimmings to assemble. What 'Providence style' was meant to signal is not recorded; here it amounts to carrots and shell beans in the sauce. 'Royal style' is the full late-Victorian display piece, complete with a carved bread vase, ornamental skewers (hâtelets) and cockscombs, a garnish then still current in classical cookery and long since abandoned. The same bird, in other words, could leave the kitchen as supper or as spectacle depending on what was set around it.