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Hashed Chicken
Put the bones and small pieces of any kind of cooked chickens into a saucepan with cold water enough to cover, add a few sliced fried onions, two carrots, sweet herbs, a blade of mace, and salt and pepper to taste. Place the pan over the fire and boil until all the goodness is extracted; then strain the liquor and add a little flour and butter to thicken it. Put into a saucepan the chicken-meat, add the gravy and place the pan on the side of the fire where it will simmer for twenty minutes; squeeze in the juice of half a lemon just before serving. Put the pieces of chicken on a dish, pour the gravy over and garnish with croutons of fried bread.
A leftovers dish built in two stages: a quick stock from the carcass, then the picked meat warmed through in the resulting gravy. The point of failure is the second stage, not the first.
- Twenty minutes is too long for cooked meatAlready-cooked chicken simmered for twenty minutes shreds and dries out. Bring the gravy to a bare simmer, add the meat, and give it five to eight minutes just to heat through.
- "Boil until all the goodness is extracted"Read this as a gentle simmer for 1 to 1.5 hours, uncovered or barely covered, skimming the scum that rises. A hard boil clouds the stock and emulsifies fat into it.
- "The side of the fire"On a coal range this was the cooler zone where a pan held steady below the boil. On a gas or induction hob it is the lowest setting, or the pan set half off the burner.
- Thickening"a little flour and butter" means either a roux (equal weights cooked together before the liquid goes in) or beurre manie (equal weights kneaded raw and whisked into the hot stock). Roughly 1 tablespoon of each per cup of strained stock. Simmer two or three minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- A blade of maceMace is the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed; a blade is one whole piece. Substitute a scant 1/8 teaspoon ground mace, or a light grating of nutmeg, and remove or strain before serving.
- Sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for a bundle of mild culinary herbs, commonly parsley and thyme with marjoram or savory, often a bay leaf, tied together. Add them for the stock only and pull them out at straining.
- Fried onions firstFrying the onion before it goes into the water is doing real work here, adding colour and depth the plain carcass cannot. Brown it properly rather than sweating it.
- YieldThe carcass and trim of one roast chicken, with the meat picked off, will stretch to about two servings. The recipe specifies fried bread rather than toast; butter or the chicken fat both suit.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, runs to more than nine hundred pages and includes a great deal of straightforward household cookery alongside the hotel's showpieces. This is one of the plain entries: a use for the carcass, in an era when a roast fowl was expensive enough that nothing came off the table unaccounted for. The two-stage method — extract a stock from bones and scraps, thicken it, then reunite it with the picked meat — is broadly typical of nineteenth-century treatments of "hash" in the older sense of the word, meaning meat cut small and served in its own sauce rather than fried into a cake. The lemon juice at the end is often described as a corrective for a gravy that has gone flat and heavy from long simmering, and it still works.