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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Ingredients
No. 132. Pollo alla Fiorentina (Chicken) Ingredients: Fowl, butter, vegetables, rice or macaroni, peppercorns, stock, ham, tomatoes, bay leaves, onions, cloves, Liebig.
Roll up a fowl in buttered paper and put it in the oven in a fireproof dish with all kinds of vegetables and a few peppercorns. Leave it there for about two hours, then put the fowl and vegetables into two quarts of good stock and let it simmer for one hour; serve on well-boiled rice or macaroni and pour the following sauce over it. Sauce :- Two pounds tomatoes, one big cup of good stock, a quarter pound of chopped ham, three bay leaves, one onion stuck with cloves, one teaspoonful of Liebig. Simmer an hour and a half.
No. 133. Pollo all' Oliva (Chicken) Ingredients: Fowl, onions, celery, salt, parsley, carrots, butter, stock, olives, tomatoes.
Cut up half an onion, a stick of celery, a sprig of parsley, a carrot, and cook them all in a quarter pound of butter. Into this put a fowl cut up and let it get brown all over, turn when necessary and then baste it with boiling stock. Add four Spanish olives cut up and four others pounded in a mortar, eight whole olives and three tablespoonsful of tomato purée reduced, and when the fowl is well cooked pour the sauce over it.
No. 134. Pollo alla Villereccia (Chicken) Ingredients: Fowl, butter, flour, stock, bacon, ham, mushrooms, onions, cloves, eggs, cream, lemons.
Cut up a fowl into quarters and put it into a saucepan with three ounces of butter and a tablespoonful of flour.
Put it on the fire, and when it is well browned add half a pint of stock, bits of bacon and ham, butter, three mushrooms (previously boiled), an onion stuck with three cloves.
When this is cooked skim off the grease, pass the sauce through a sieve, and add the yolks of two eggs mixed with two tablespoonsful of cream.
Lastly, add a squeeze of lemon juice to the sauce and pour it over the fowl.
No. 135. Pollo alla Cacciatora (Chicken) Ingredients: The same as No. 134 and tomatoes.
Cook the fowl exactly as above, but add either a purée of tomatoes or tomato sauce.
Four chicken dishes from an Italian-inflected English kitchen of about 1900, written in the shorthand style of the period: an ingredient list with no weights for the bird, and cooking times pitched at a mature boiling fowl rather than anything sold today. The times are the main thing to adjust.
- "Fowl" is not a modern chickenA fowl meant an older laying hen, tough and full of flavour, which is why No. 132 tolerates two hours in the oven followed by an hour of simmering. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken treated that way will fall to shreds and dry out. Either seek out a genuine boiling fowl and keep the long times, or use a supermarket bird and cut the oven stage to about an hour and the simmer to twenty minutes.
- LiebigLiebig's Extract of Meat, a dark concentrated beef paste sold in stoneware jars from the 1860s onward. A teaspoon of a modern beef bouillon concentrate or a yeast-and-beef extract gives the same salty, savoury depth; add it at the end and taste, as these products are saltier than the original.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the original assumes a range oven judged by eye and hand. Around 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent for the buttered-paper method in No. 132. The paper presumably shields the bird from drying and browning, so parchment is the closer stand-in for buttered paper.
- The egg and cream liaisonIn No. 134 the yolks and cream go into the strained sauce off the heat. If the sauce returns to a boil the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks. Bring it to no more than a bare steam, stirring, and add the lemon juice last, after the heat is off, since acid tightens the yolks further.
- Spanish olivesGreen olives in brine, of the sort now sold as Queen or Gordal. Buy them unstuffed and pit them yourself; the pimiento in a stuffed olive turns the sauce sweet and cloudy.
- Tomato puréeThe "three tablespoonsful of tomato purée reduced" most likely means a sieved fresh-tomato pulp cooked down, closer to passata reduced than to concentrated tube paste, which is considerably stronger. Start with about one tablespoon of tube paste if that is what you have.
- Stock quantityTwo quarts of stock for one bird in No. 132 is a poaching bath, not a sauce. Strain and save it; it is the best part of the dish and makes an excellent soup the next day.
- YieldEach of these serves four, or five stretched over rice or macaroni as No. 132 directs. The tomato sauce in No. 132 makes considerably more than one fowl needs; half quantities are sufficient.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) takes its title and frame from Boccaccio, presenting a party of diners and a run of Italian recipes gathered for English cooks at a moment when Italian food was still unfamiliar in London kitchens. The names of these four sketch the range of Italian cooking vocabulary of the day: alla fiorentina, Florentine; all' oliva, with olives; alla villereccia, country or rustic style; and alla cacciatora, hunter's style, which here simply means the previous dish with tomato added -- a reminder that cacciatora covered a loose family of preparations before it settled into the tomato-and-pepper version familiar now. The presence of Liebig's extract in a Florentine chicken points to an English kitchen: the German chemist's meat extract was a fixture of the late-Victorian larder, and English writers of the period often reached for it in place of a longer-simmered broth.