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Pickled Chicken
Boil four chickens till tender enough for meat to fall from bones; put meat in a stone jar, and pour over it three pints of cold vinegar, and a pint and half of the water in which the chickens were boiled; add spices if preferred, and it will be ready for use in two days.-Emma Gould Rea.
A pickle rather than a preserve: fully cooked chicken steeped in diluted vinegar and eaten within days. The recipe was written for a cool cellar and a household that could work through four birds, so both the scale and the storage need rethinking.
- Keep it coldThe original assumes a stone jar in a cold cellar or springhouse. Broth-diluted vinegar is not strong enough to hold cooked poultry safely at room temperature; refrigerate the jar from the moment it is filled and treat the contents as you would any cooked chicken, eating within about a week.
- Scale it downFour whole chickens yields several pounds of picked meat, far more than most kitchens want at once. One 4 lb bird with 1.5 cups vinegar and 3/4 cup of the cooking liquid keeps the same proportions.
- The liquid ratioThree pints vinegar to a pint and a half of broth is exactly two parts vinegar to one part stock. Nineteenth-century cider vinegar was variable in strength; modern 5% cider vinegar diluted this way lands near 3.3% acetic acid, sharp enough to taste like a pickle but not a shelf-stable cure.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. Any non-reactive vessel does the job - glass or food-grade plastic. Avoid aluminium, copper or unlined cast iron, which the vinegar will attack.
- Boiling the birds"Tender enough for meat to fall from bones" is roughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer for a whole chicken. A hard boil shreds the meat and clouds the broth you are about to pour back over it. Pull the meat off warm, discard skin and bones, and let it cool before covering with the cold vinegar.
- Spices, if preferredWhole black pepper, cloves, allspice, mace and a bay leaf, sometimes with mustard seed, are the sort of spices used in pickled meats of this period. Add them whole to the cold liquid rather than ground, or the pickle turns muddy.
- ServingServe the meat cold, drained well; the vinegar both flavours and firms it. The original gives two days as the point at which it is ready for use.
Pickling was one of the standard ways of stretching poultry before mechanical refrigeration reached the ordinary household, and it sits in The Dixie Cook-Book alongside other keeping dishes - potted, spiced and jellied meats - that turned a glut of birds into cold food ready to hand. The technique is older than the book by centuries: vinegar-steeped cooked meats appear in English cookery from at least the seventeenth century, often as "souse" or "collared" dishes. Like many entries in this and other late-century community cookbooks, it carries a contributor's name - Emma Gould Rea - a reminder that these volumes were compiled from the kitchens of real contributors rather than written by a single author, and that the instructions assume a reader who already knew how long a chicken takes to fall off the bone.