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Roast Chicken
Take a chicken, clean, singe, and remove the pin feathers; then wipe it clean, stuff and truss it. Rub it over with a mixture of salt, pepper, and flour, and warmed butter, and put it into a bakingpan with a little chicken fat or dripping, and set it in the oven. When the flour is well browned, reduce the heat of the oven, baste well with its fat, and afterward with three or four ounces of butter melted in a breakfast cupful of boiling water. When the chicken is brown on one side, turn it over on the other, so as to color it well all over, adding a little more water if there should not be sufficient to baste with. A bird weighing from four and a half to five pounds will take about an hour and a half to bake.
Roasted Chicken, Maryland Style Take two small chickens, detach their legs and wings and lay them on a plate; season with salt and pepper, dip them in beaten egg, roll in sifted breadcrumbs, and place them in a buttered pan. Pour over an ounce of clarified butter and roast in the oven for eighteen minutes. Pour half a pint of cream sauce on to a hot dish, arrange the chickens on top, decorate with six thin slices of broiled bacon, also six small corn fritters, and serve as hot as possible.
Roasted Chicken with Chestnut Stuffing Dress two small chickens and boil gently in sufficient water to cover until tender. While they are cooking, either boil or roast sufficient chestnuts to fill it. If the nuts are roasted, make a cross cut on each to prevent the bursting of the shell. Remove the shells and skins of the chestnuts, fill the chicken with them, and brown it quickly in a hot oven, basting it every few minutes with butter, salt and pepper mixed together. Serve when sufficiently brown.
Three related methods are run together here: a plain roast bird, the hotel version of Chicken Maryland, and a boiled-then-browned chicken with chestnuts. Oscar assumes a coal range and a cook who watches it, so the useful work is in fixing the temperatures and the doneness test.
- The flour rub is the hingeThe salt, pepper, flour and softened butter smeared over the skin is what browns first and tells you when to drop the heat. Start at 450F, and once that coating has coloured, come down to 350F for the rest of the time.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Treat it as one cup of boiling water with 3 to 4 oz butter melted into it, and add more water as the pan dries.
- Time and temperatureAn hour and a half at 350F is about right for a 4.5 to 5 lb bird, but judge it by an instant-read thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and the same in the centre of any stuffing.
- Turning the birdTurning breast-down for part of the roast does keep the breast moist, but it needs two forks and a firm hand in a hot oven. A rack in the pan and the breast covered with buttered paper for the first stretch achieves the same thing with less drama.
- Singeing and pin feathersModern supermarket birds arrive plucked and clean, so this step is usually unnecessary. Free-range or farm-bought birds may still carry pin feathers; pull them with tweezers rather than passing the bird over a flame.
- Chicken fat or drippingRendered chicken fat is worth keeping if you have it; otherwise use clarified butter or a neutral oil, which will take the initial 450F without smoking as readily as whole butter.
- Maryland styleEighteen minutes suits the small detached legs and wings the recipe calls for, at 425F, but crumbed joints on the bone from a modern 3 to 4 lb bird will want longer. Check for 165F rather than trusting the clock, and note that the coating browns better if the pieces are spaced apart in the pan.
- Chestnut versionBoiling the birds first and then browning them is an old way to guarantee tenderness; keep the poaching liquid for the sauce. Score raw chestnuts before roasting as directed, and peel them while still hot, since the inner skin sets hard as it cools.
- YieldThe 5 lb roast bird serves four to five. Each of the two-chicken preparations serves four to six, with the Maryland version counting on the bacon and corn fritters to fill out the plate.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book is a large hotel-kitchen compendium rather than a tightly organised domestic manual, which may be why a page can carry three versions of one dish with no serving suggestions attached. The plain roast is the classic method of basting with butter melted in water, a technique that keeps the surface from scorching over a fierce range fire while the flour coating crisps. "Maryland style" is the more interesting entry: the combination of crumbed chicken, cream sauce, bacon and corn fritters is generally traced to Chesapeake fried chicken with milk gravy, and as Chicken Maryland it became a fixture of hotel and transatlantic liner menus, staying on them well into the twentieth century. Chestnut stuffing belonged to the autumn and winter table, when roasted chestnuts were sold by street vendors in New York.