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Boiled Fowl, Celery Sauce
Singe, cut off head and feet from a tender fowl of three and a half pounds, draw, wipe and truss; place in a saucepan with one carrot, one onion with two cloves stuck in it, two leeks, two branches parsley, one sprig thyme and a bay leaf; pour in sufficient water to cover fowl. Season with tablespoon salt, cover pan and slowly boil two hours. Take up fowl, dress on a large hot dish, untruss. Pour a celery sauce over the chicken and serve. N. B. Strain the broth of the fowl and use as for white broth.
A straightforward poached bird whose success depends almost entirely on keeping the water below a real boil. The recipe also assumes a bird and a sauce that a modern reader has to supply for themselves.
- "Slowly boil" means a bare simmerTake the pot to a boil once, skim, then hold it at 180-190F where the surface only shudders. A rolling boil for two hours shreds the breast and clouds the broth you are told to save.
- A fowl is not a broiler"Fowl" in this period means an older laying hen with worked muscle and plenty of collagen, which is why two hours is reasonable. A modern supermarket 3 1/2 lb chicken will usually be poached through well inside two hours; a genuine stewing hen of the same weight will want the full two hours or longer.
- Singe, draw, trussSingeing burns off residual hairs and down over a flame, and drawing means removing the innards. Both are done for you now. Trussing is still worth doing so the legs do not splay and the bird holds its shape on the platter.
- The saltOne tablespoon in the several quarts needed to cover the bird is a light seasoning rather than a brine, which suits a broth the recipe tells you to strain and keep for further use.
- The celery sauce is assumedThe book expects you to know it: a white roux loosened with the poaching broth and a little cream, with celery either simmered in it and sieved, or sweated in butter and folded through. Use the fowl's own liquid rather than milk alone, or the sauce tastes of nothing.
- Onion cloutéThe onion stuck with two cloves is the classic oignon clouté; the cloves stay put and come out with the onion instead of scattering through the broth.
- Doneness165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Rest the bird a few minutes before untrussing so it does not tear.
- YieldA 3 1/2 lb bird will serve about four, and since the water only has to cover the fowl you should finish with a few quarts of light broth for the "white broth" the note refers to.
Boiled fowl with a white sauce was one of the most respectable dishes in the nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American repertoire: the meat plain, the interest carried entirely by the sauce, which might be celery, egg, parsley or oyster. The two-for-one logic is the real point, and it is why the note about the broth is not an afterthought — a household got a platter of meat and a stockpot of blanc out of one bird. Celery, once an expensive winter luxury raised in trenches and sold blanched and pale, had become cheap enough by the time this book appeared to be treated as an everyday flavouring; the pairing with poached chicken is generally traced to English cookery of the previous century, and it travelled into American books as a standard Sunday dish. Its place in a section called The World's Kitchen says more about how broadly that phrase was used when the book appeared than about the dish's geography.