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Broiled Chickens with Bacon
Singe two chickens, draw and wipe them; cut off their heads and then split them lengthwise without separating. Place them on a dish, season with salt, pepper and one tablespoonful of sweet oil, turn them well in the seasoning and broil for nine minutes on each side. Prepare six small toasts on a hot dish, arrange the chickens over, spread half a gill of maitre d'hotel butter on top and add six thin slices of boiled bacon.
A plain broiled spatchcock, the sort of order the Waldorf grill turned out by the hundred. The only real difficulty is that nine minutes a side assumes a bird half the size of what you will buy today.
- The timing is the hingeNine minutes a side suits a 1½–2 lb spring chicken split flat over live coals. A modern 3½–4 lb broiler split the same way needs roughly 30–40 minutes total with the heat pulled back after the skin colours, and the thigh should read 165F. Cook to the thermometer, not the clock.
- Singe and drawThese steps assume a bird delivered with pinfeathers and innards intact. Buy it dressed, remove the giblets, and dry the skin thoroughly — surface moisture is what keeps it from browning.
- Split lengthwise without separatingThe recipe does not say which side is cut; the usual reading is a cut through the backbone with the bird pressed flat and the breast left joined, i.e. spatchcocking. Snipping out the backbone entirely and cracking the keel bone gives a flatter, more evenly cooked bird.
- Sweet oilOlive oil. 'Sweet' was the common trade term for edible oil, generally understood to mark it off from rancid or non-food grades. One tablespoon between two birds is a rub, not a marinade.
- BroilIn 1896 this meant a hinged gridiron over coals. A modern overhead broiler works if the rack sits 6–8 inches down; a grill over live coals is closer to the original.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is about a quarter cup, four tablespoons — of maître d'hôtel butter, which is butter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Have it cold so it melts over the hot birds at the table.
- Boiled baconNot crisp strips. This is a piece of cured bacon simmered until tender and sliced thin, closer to what a British cook means by boiled bacon or to thick-cut ham. Sliced cooked ham is the nearest supermarket equivalent.
- YieldTwo small birds and six toasts point to four servings, or six as part of a longer menu.
Broiled chicken with bacon was standing hotel-grill vocabulary in the 1890s, and Oscar Tschirky's book records it in the compressed shorthand a professional kitchen actually used — no oven, no doneness test, because the man reading it was assumed to know the dish already. The maître d'hôtel butter is the tell: a simple compound of butter, parsley and lemon whose name carries the literal sense of the steward of the house, and by the late nineteenth century a common finish for grilled dishes in a French-trained kitchen. The small size of the birds is worth noting too. Before industrial broiler breeding, a chicken young and tender enough to split and grill weighed a pound or two, which is why nine minutes a side was a reasonable instruction rather than a reckless one.