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Chicken Fricassee
Sarah Page.
Cut up the chickens and put on the fire in a kettle with cold water sufficient to cover, add a little salt or salt pork sliced, if you like; boil until tender, and cut up and put in part of a head of celery. When tender have ready hot baking-powder biscuits broken open and laid on a platter; on this place the chicken; thicken the gravy with flour moistened with water or milk, and pour it over the chicken and biscuits. If you prefer, use a good-sized piece of butter to season instead of the salt pork. Oysters are an addition.
A plain boiled fricassee served over split biscuits rather than in a sauced skillet. The recipe assumes a stewing hen and a cook who knows what "tender" looks like; a modern bird changes the timing more than anything else.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerChicken covered with cold water and brought to a rolling boil turns stringy and clouds the broth. Bring it up slowly, then hold it at a lazy simmer with the surface barely moving.
- KettleIn this period a kettle is any large lidded pot for the stove, not a tea kettle. A 6- to 8-quart Dutch oven is the right vessel.
- Cooking timeA nineteenth-century fowl might need two to three hours. A supermarket broiler-fryer cut into eight pieces is done in 45 to 60 minutes; breast pieces are ready well before thighs and can be lifted out early.
- Salt porkTwo to three ounces, sliced thin, is plenty for one chicken, and it does the salting. If you use the butter option instead, salt the broth from the start rather than at the end.
- "Part of a head of celery"Three or four ribs with their leaves. Add them for the last 20 minutes only; celery cooked the full time goes limp and gives up its flavor to the broth without keeping any.
- Thickening the gravyWhisk the flour into cold water or milk until smooth before it goes near the pot, and count on about 2 tablespoons flour per cup of broth for a gravy that will coat. Simmer two or three minutes after it thickens to cook out the raw taste.
- OystersSlip them in off the heat, or into the finished gravy for no more than a minute or two, just until the edges ruffle. Anything longer and they shrink to rubber. Their liquor can go into the gravy.
- BiscuitsBake them while the chicken finishes, at 425F, and split them hot. They should be sturdy enough to hold gravy without dissolving, so a firm rolled biscuit works better than a very light drop biscuit.
- YieldOne chicken with about eight biscuits serves four generously.
Fricassee in American home cookery drifted a long way from the French original, which is a white stew of cut-up fowl finished with cream and egg yolk. By the time community cookbooks like The Home Cook Book were being compiled in the 1870s, the word covered almost any chicken cut up, stewed and served in its own thickened broth. What marks this version as American is the platter of split baking-powder biscuits underneath, a cousin of chicken and dumplings and of the biscuit-and-gravy tradition, and made practical by the chemical leaveners that had become cheap and reliable in the middle of the century. The oysters at the end are equally of their moment: oysters were an ordinary pantry addition rather than a luxury, an era closed largely by overfishing and pollution around the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the period toss them into everything from stuffing to beef pie. The recipe carries a contributor's name, as entries in these subscription books sometimes do, since they were assembled from the households of a single town or church and sold to raise money.