Chop up three pounds of chicken carcasses; put them in a saucepan with two quarts and a half of water, and a little salt; boil, then skim, add a well washed lettuce head, and half an ounce of chervil. Let boil for an hour and a half, remove all the fat and pass through a fine sieve; serve in cups. This preparation should produce about a quart of liquid.
A clear chicken broth built from bones alone, lightly flavored with lettuce and chervil rather than the usual carrot and onion. The proportions are exact enough to follow as written: 2.5 quarts of water reduced to about 1 quart.
This comes from the invalid cookery chapter of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium written by the chef of Delmonico's in New York. Nineteenth-century medical opinion held that a convalescent could absorb the "essence" of meat when solid food was impossible, so clear broths, beef teas and barley waters occupied a formal place in both cookbooks and nursing manuals — the assumption, later shown to be mistaken, being that a cup of broth carried real nourishment rather than mostly water, gelatin and salt. The choice of lettuce and chervil instead of the standard aromatic vegetables may belong to the same reasoning: onion and garlic were often described as stimulating and hard to digest, while lettuce had a long reputation as cooling and soothing. Chervil is one of the herbs of the French fines herbes; it appears more readily in cookbooks of Ranhofer's day than in modern ones, and it wilts within a day or two of cutting, which does not suit long-distance shipping.