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Boiled Stuffed Chicken
Fill the body of a cleansed fowl or chicken with small onions, which have been half cooked in milk. Boil the giblets with some onions and two or three slices of bacon, and when done, strain the gravy in a saucepan, put in the fowl and simmer until quite tender. Boil three large onions in a quart of milk, and when it is reduced to half its original quantity, thicken with half a teacupful of flour that has been smoothly moistened with milk. Stir the sauce over the fire until thick; add two pats of butter and a little pepper and salt and stir by the side of the fire until the butter is dissolved. Dish the fowl, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A late-Victorian boiled fowl with onion sauce, written for a cook who already knows how long a hen takes. The measurements are loose and the timing is left to judgement, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- The hinge: never let it boilDespite the title, the bird is simmered in the giblet broth at a bare tremble, around 180-190F. A rolling boil shrinks and toughens the breast and clouds the stock you will not be using for the sauce but will want for soup.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the measure was never standardised; half a teacupful of flour is therefore roughly 3/8 cup. That is a lot of thickener for a pint of reduced milk; start with less and slacken with more milk if the sauce sets up like paste.
- Pats of butterA pat was an imprecise measure, anywhere from a teaspoon to an ounce, so read two pats as a tablespoon or two. Stir them in away from direct heat -- the recipe's "by the side of the fire" -- so the sauce stays glossy rather than splitting.
- TimingA 4-5 lb chicken needs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours at a simmer; an older "fowl" (a stewing hen, rarely sold now) could take 2 1/2 hours or more. 165F at the thigh joint is the safety minimum, but the recipe's test is "quite tender", which a tough bird reaches only well beyond that.
- Fowl versus chickenThe recipe distinguishes the two because the market did. A boiling fowl was a spent laying hen: tough, deeply flavoured, and suited to long moist cooking. A supermarket roasting chicken is the practical substitute, but the broth will be milder, so keep the bacon in the giblet pot.
- The onion stuffingSmall onions half cooked in milk means peeled boiling onions or shallots blanched until barely yielding. They finish inside the bird and should be lifted out and served alongside; they are not a bread stuffing and will not hold together.
- The sauce is a separate panThree large onions boiled in a quart of milk reduced by half, then thickened, is an English onion sauce made independently of the poaching liquid. Milk scorches easily at that reduction, so use a heavy pan and stir the bottom. For a smooth sauce, sieve or blend the onions in; for the period texture, leave them in pieces.
- YieldServes four to six, with enough sauce to nap the carved bird. The strained poaching broth is worth keeping for soup the next day.
Boiled fowl with onion sauce was a fixture of English and American middle-class cookery, and it survived on hotel menus as the mild alternative to roast and grilled meats, often said to suit an invalid or a cautious diner. Its logic belongs to the era of the laying hen: a bird past egg production was too tough to roast but became tender in gentle liquid, and the flavour it lost to the pot was replaced by a rich flour-and-milk sauce. That sauce is the older English style of thickening, made by reducing milk with aromatics and beating in moistened flour, a domestic technique that coexisted with the roux-based béchamel already standard in American professional and domestic cookery.