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Pressed Chicken
Put a chicken into a saucepan with a very little water and boil until the bones slip out and the gristly parts are quite soft. Take off the skin and pull the meat to pieces, mixing the dark-colored and white meat together. Skim the fat off the liquor and season with a little pepper, salt, lemon-juice and celery salt, and reduce to half a pint, then mix it in with the meat. Butter a mould and decorate the bottom and sides with hard-boiled eggs cut in slices and small fancy-shaped pieces of tongue or ham; pack the meat in tightly, put a weight on the top and let it remain in a cold place until wanted. Turn them out and garnish with parsley, lettuce leaves, celery branches, radishes or beet-roots cut into various shapes.
A jellied chicken loaf that sets on nothing but its own reduced stock, which makes the reduction the whole recipe. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: reduce hard enoughThe half-pint of liquor is what glues the loaf together, and it will only do so if the collagen from the bones and gristle is concentrated. Reduce to a scant cup and test by chilling a teaspoonful on a saucer — it should set firm, not merely thicken. If it stays loose, keep reducing or add 1 teaspoon powdered gelatin softened in cold water.
- "Boil" means simmerTake the wording as period usage. A bare simmer at around 200F brings a 4 to 5 lb bird to the point where the bones slip and the cartilage is soft; reckon on 2 1/2 to 3 hours or more, and judge by the bones rather than the clock. A rolling boil shreds the meat, clouds the stock and drives off the body you need.
- Very little waterAdd just enough to come about halfway up the bird and keep the lid on. Starting with a full pot means an hour of extra reduction later and a flatter flavour. An older stewing hen, if you can get one, gives far more gelatin than a young roaster.
- Half a pintOne US cup. Season the liquor before reducing only lightly — concentrating it will sharpen the salt considerably — and correct at the end, when the flavour is where it will actually be.
- Celery saltStill sold, still the same thing: ground celery seed cut with salt. Count it toward the total salt in the dish rather than as a free seasoning.
- TonguePickled beef tongue was a common larder item in the period and is now a butcher's order. Thin-sliced ham, mortadella or prosciutto cut with a small cutter does the same decorative job.
- The mould and the weightA 1 1/2 quart loaf tin or terrine suits one chicken. Line it with plastic wrap for a clean turn-out, arrange the egg and tongue slices, pack the meat and stock in tightly, then press with a board and 2 to 3 lb of weight — cans work — so the loaf slices rather than crumbles.
- "A cold place" means the refrigeratorOscar's cold larder is not a substitute for 40F or below. Chill at least 8 hours, overnight is better, and treat it as you would any cooked chicken: eat within three days.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb chicken gives a loaf that serves 8 as a cold lunch or buffet dish, more if sliced thin as part of a cold table.
Pressed meats belong to the age before mechanical refrigeration was universal, when a cook's way of holding cooked meat was to seal it in its own set jelly under weight — the same logic as brawn, head cheese and potted meats. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from 1893, and his 1896 book records the kind of cold buffet cookery a large hotel produced in quantity: made the day before, turned out whole, sliced to order and dressed with parsley, radishes and beet-root cut in shapes. Pressed chicken travelled well beyond hotel kitchens too, showing up through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in church supper and ladies' aid cookbooks across America, where it was valued for stretching one bird across a crowd. The decorative lining of hard-boiled egg and tongue is a plain domestic echo of the French chaud-froid and aspic work that formal service of the period took for granted.