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Baked Spring Chickens
Cut each of four chickens into seven or nine pieces, wash thoroughly and quickly, and put in a colander to drain; put a half table-spoon each of lard and butter into a dripping-pan, lay in the pieces, and add half a pint hot water; place in oven and bake half an hour, turn, taking care that they get only to a light brown, and, just before taking up, add salt and pepper to taste; when done take out in a dish and keep hot. To make the gravy, add a half pint or more of water, set the dripping-pan on the stove, and add one table-spoon flour mixed with half cup of cream or milk, stirring slowly, adding a little of the mixture at a time. Let cook thoroughly, stirring constantly to prevent burning, and to make the gravy nice and smooth; season more if necessary. - Mrs. L. Hush.
A plain braise-roast in an open pan: the water keeps the pieces moist while the fat browns them, then the pan liquid becomes the gravy. Two things need translating for a modern kitchen, the oven temperature the book never states and the size of the birds.
- Spring chickensThese were young birds of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb dressed, closer to today's poussin or a small broiler than to a supermarket roaster. Four of them cut into seven or nine pieces each feeds eight to twelve people; scale to one small chicken per two or three eaters.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because a coal range was judged by hand. Bake at 375-400F, which browns lightly in the half hour indicated without drying the pan out.
- Half a pintOne cup, both for the water in the pan and for the water added to the gravy. A gill, if you meet one elsewhere in this book, is half a cup.
- Dripping-panA shallow metal roasting pan, not a covered casserole. Use something with sides low enough that the pieces brown rather than steam, and sturdy enough to go directly on a burner for the gravy.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockHalf an hour with a turn will not reliably finish modern chicken pieces, even small ones. Take thighs and drumsticks to 175F and breast to 165F on an instant-read thermometer; add water if the pan threatens to scorch.
- Salting at the endThe recipe adds salt and pepper just before taking up. Salting the pieces before they go in gives better seasoned meat and better browning; keep a little back for the gravy.
- The gravyOne tablespoon of flour to a cup or more of pan liquid plus half a cup of cream makes a thin, pouring gravy. If you want it to coat, use two tablespoons of flour, and add the flour-and-cream slurry in a slow trickle while whisking or it will lump.
"Spring chicken" is often said to have begun as a literal market term before becoming a figure of speech: birds hatched in late winter and sold young in spring, when the previous year's laying hens were tough and the new flock was not yet grown. The whole rhythm of a nineteenth-century poultry yard sits behind the phrase, and behind the method too, since a tender young bird needed only a half hour in a hot pan while an older fowl demanded hours of stewing. The Dixie Cook Book, first published in the early 1880s and reissued for decades afterward, gathered contributions under the names of individual housekeepers, as here with Mrs. L. Hush, which is why the recipe reads like one cook explaining her own pan to another rather than a standardized formula. The finish, a flour-and-milk gravy built in the drippings, uses the same technique as the cream gravy still served with fried chicken across the South.