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Boiled Fowl, Indienne
Cut off the head and feet of a tender, three-and-a-half-pound fowl. Singe, draw, keeping the liver and heart. Brown in a small frying pan half a small white onion, finely chopped up, with a teaspoon butter, then place the onion in a bowl. Finely chop the liver and heart, and add to the bowl with half ounce finely chopped fresh beef marrow, three tablespoons bread crumbs, two tablespoons milk and one raw egg. Season with half teaspoon curry powder, three saltspoons salt and a saltspoon thyme. Mix well, stuff the fowl with this force, neatly truss, lay it in a saucepan and pour in sufficient cold water to cover the bird, adding one carrot, one onion, two leeks, three branches celery and two branches parsley. Season with a tablespoon salt and a teaspoon curry powder, cover the pan and let boil for one hour. Remove all the vegetables from the pan, add six ounces raw rice, cover the pan again and set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, dress the rice on a large hot dish, untruss the fowl and lay it on the rice, pour a curry sauce over and serve.
A poached stuffed chicken with rice cooked in its own broth, dressed with curry sauce. Two things need attention: the bird should never actually boil, and the curry sauce is assumed rather than given.
- Simmer, do not boilA rolling boil for an hour will shred the breast and cloud the broth, and the rice cooked in it later will taste muddy. Bring to a bare simmer and hold it there, with the surface barely moving.
- Saltspoons and other old measuresA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of salt is three-quarters of a teaspoon. Half an ounce of marrow is about a tablespoon; six ounces of raw rice is a scant cupful.
- What a "fowl" wasIn this period a fowl generally meant a mature bird, tougher and more flavourful than a modern broiler and needing long cooking, though this recipe does specify a tender one. A 3.5 lb supermarket chicken will be done well inside the hour; check the thigh rather than trusting the clock.
- Beef marrowAsk a butcher for split marrow bones and scrape the marrow out cold, or leave it out and use an extra teaspoon of butter. It is there for richness and to keep the forcemeat moist, not for flavour of its own.
- Stuffing temperatureThe forcemeat contains raw egg and chopped liver and sits in the coldest part of the bird. Take it to 165F at the centre of the cavity, which may mean a few minutes longer than the bird itself requires.
- The oven stageThe recipe gives no temperature, only "set in the oven"; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, will let the rice absorb the broth without scorching. Keep the lid on and resist stirring; the bird sits on top of the rice throughout.
- The curry sauceThe recipe assumes you have a curry sauce to hand but does not give one. A roux of butter and flour cooked with curry powder and let down with the strained cooking broth will serve, finished with a little cream if you like.
- YieldServes four generously, with rice enough for a fifth. Strain and keep any surplus broth; it is well seasoned and useful.
Indienne is French kitchen shorthand for a dish built on curry powder, and by the time this book appeared curry had been thoroughly domesticated in both English and French cooking through the commercial powders sold by grocers, which had been on the market since the late eighteenth century. The dish sits in the older European tradition of the boiled stuffed fowl served on rice cooked in its own broth, a frugal one-pot method that turns a single bird and a bunch of soup vegetables into a full course; the curry powder and the sauce read as a later overlay on that frame rather than anything Indian in structure. The forcemeat of liver, heart, marrow, crumbs and egg is standard classical French practice, and its presence here is a fair picture of how cookbooks of the period handled foreign flavour: a familiar technique, seasoned differently and renamed.