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Boiled Fowl, Anglaise
Singe, cut off head and feet, neatly wipe and truss a tender fowl of three and a half to four pounds. Place in a saucepan with enough water to cover it, season with a heavy teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then let boil for fifteen minutes. With a large Parisian potato scoop dig out all you can from three large carrots and three large turnips and add to the fowl. Tie together two leeks, two branches marjoram, one bay leaf, one clove, add to the fowl, cover pan and let boil for forty-five minutes. Scoop out two raw potatoes with the same scoop, thoroughly wash, add to fowl with six small white onions, and let continually boil for thirty minutes. Divide a small head of raw cauliflower in sections, wash and drain well, place in saucepan with a gill milk, quart water, teaspoon salt, boil for forty minutes and drain on a sieve. Dress on a hot dish, untruss, arrange vegetables alternately by groups around fowl and serve with an onion sauce separately. Strain broth of fowl into the white broth pan.
A whole bird simmered with turned vegetables and served with onion sauce — straightforward, but the timings belong to an older bird and a professional kitchen.
- "Fowl" is not a supermarket chickenIn period usage a fowl generally meant a mature bird rather than a spring chicken, which is the sort of bird that will stand the ninety minutes of boiling here, though the recipe does ask for a tender one. A modern 3.5–4 lb chicken is done in 60–75 minutes at a bare simmer; check the thigh joint rather than the clock.
- Boil means simmerThe recipe says boil throughout, and a hard boil will shred the breast and cloud the broth. Keep the surface barely trembling — the broth is saved at the end, and a rolling boil emulsifies the fat into it.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller. The carrots, turnips and potatoes are scooped into small spheres so they cook evenly and plate in neat groups; the trimmings should go into the stockpot rather than the bin.
- Vegetable timingsAs written the carrot and turnip balls cook for seventy-five minutes and the potatoes and onions for thirty, which will reduce them to mush. Add the carrots and turnips for the last 20–25 minutes and the potato balls and onions for the last 15, or cook them separately in some of the broth and reunite at the dish.
- Cauliflower for forty minutesFar too long by any current standard. Florets in the milk-and-water blanc need 5–8 minutes; the milk is there to keep them white, not to soften them further.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces.
- Singeing and trussingSingeing burned off pinfeathers on a bird plucked at home and is unnecessary now. Trussing still matters here — it keeps the legs from splaying and the bird from falling apart in the liquid.
- Onion sauceThe recipe assumes a familiar accompaniment: a white sauce with onions cooked without colour, thinned with a little of the cooking broth. Make it while the bird rests.
- "The white broth pan" and yieldA professional instruction: the strained cooking liquid was returned to the kitchen's pot of white stock. At home, strain, chill and skim it. The bird serves four to five.
Anglaise simply marks the dish as English, and boiled fowl was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English dinner table — a plain-boiled bird, root vegetables, and a white sauce, the sort of thing Mrs Beeton and her contemporaries printed year after year, though their boiled fowl was more often paired with white, oyster, celery or parsley sauce than with onion. What is distinctly professional here is the treatment: the vegetables are turned into uniform balls with a Parisian scoop and arranged in separate groups around the fowl, and the cooking liquid is not thrown away but strained back into the kitchen's white broth. That last line places the recipe squarely in a restaurant brigade rather than a household, which fits its author, Alexander Filippini, a long-serving chef at Delmonico's in New York; his International Cook Book works its way through the national styles of the period, giving each a Delmonico finish.