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Roast Chickens
Mrs. Jas. Beaty.
Wash them clean outside and inside : stuff them as directed for turkeys; baste them with butter, lard, or drippings, and roast them about an hour. Chickens should de cooked thoroughly. Stew the inwards till tender, and till there is but little water; chop them and mix in gravy from the dripping-pan; thicken with brown flour; season with salt, pepper, and butter. Cranberry or new made apple sauce, is good with them.
A brief nineteenth-century roast that assumes you already know the turkey recipe a few pages earlier and that you own a dripping-pan. Two things need translating: the oven, which is never named, and the giblet gravy.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the cook judged her range by hand and eye. Roast at 375F; a 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird takes about 1 1/4 hours, larger birds proportionally longer. The stated "about an hour" suits the smaller birds of the period, which were generally lighter than a modern roasting chicken.
- "Cooked thoroughly"This is the one line to take seriously, and it is the only doneness cue offered. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh, clear of bone: 165F. If the bird is stuffed, the center of the stuffing must reach 165F as well, which usually means the breast overshoots — cook the stuffing separately if that bothers you.
- "The inwards"The giblets: heart, gizzard and neck, plus the liver if you want it. Simmer the heart, gizzard and neck 45 minutes to an hour in barely enough water to cover; add the liver only for the last 10 minutes or it turns grainy and bitter. Chop fine and add to the pan juices.
- Brown flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns the color of sand. It thickens less powerfully than raw flour, so allow noticeably more of it. Cookbooks of the period frequently advise browning flour in advance and keeping it in a jar.
- Basting fatsButter, lard and drippings are offered interchangeably. Butter browns the skin fastest and burns soonest; lard or the pan drippings are more forgiving over an hour. Any of them works, and basting every 20 minutes is plenty.
- "New made apple sauce"Apple sauce cooked that day and served warm or barely cool, not the jarred, sweetened kind. Tart apples, a little water, no spice needed. Cranberry sauce of the period could be either whole berries cooked with sugar or a strained jelly; both were in use.
- YieldOne 4 lb chicken serves four. The recipe is written in the plural, as such headings often were. The giblet gravy from a single bird makes roughly 1 1/2 cups.
Roast fowl with giblet gravy is one of the oldest continuous items in English and American cookery, and by the 1870s it was so familiar that a compiler could dispose of it in five lines and cross-reference the stuffing to the turkey entry. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was assembled from contributions by named local women — here Mrs. Jas. Beaty — and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest charity-compiled cookbooks in Canada. The brevity is characteristic of the genre: these were memoranda passed between cooks who already knew the work, not instruction for beginners. The recipe calls for browned flour, and the pairing of poultry with cranberry or apple sauce was already old enough by then to need no defense.