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Fowl Au Riz, Menagere
Neatly singe a tender, fat fowl of about three and one-half pounds. Pick out the eyes, remove the skin from the head and neck. Clip off the nails from the toes. Dip the feet in boiling water up to the first joint for two minutes, then with a coarse towel remove the skin from the feet. Neatly draw; remove the gallbag from the liver, separate the heart from the intestines and fat as well. Finely chop the liver and heart with half a medium white onion. Place the hash in a frying pan with a teaspoon butter and cook for five minutes; then transfer it into a bowl, adding to it four tablespoons bread crumbs, one ounce finely chopped beef marrow, half a teaspoon chopped chervil, half a bean finely crushed garlic. Season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper; crack in one fresh egg and pour in one tablespoon cold milk, mix with a wooden spoon for two minutes and then stuff the fowl with the preparation. Sew up the aperture, then nicely truss the fowl. Finely chop all the giblets, place in a large saucepan, adding three branches chopped celery, one finely chopped onion and two finely chopped leeks. Set the pan on the fire and cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the fowl to the pan, moisten with a quart of hot water. Season with a teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. As soon as it comes to a boil, add four ounces Carolina rice, cover the pan and set in the oven for one hour. Remove the fowl from the pan, untruss, dress the rice on a large dish, place the fowl on top and serve.
A stuffed boiled fowl with rice cooked in its own broth, written when the cook bought the bird whole with head and feet attached. Most of the first third of the recipe is butchery you will not have to do.
- Skip the dressing stepsSingeing, eye removal, nail clipping and scalding the feet all assume a bird straight from the poulterer. A supermarket chicken of 3 1/2 to 4 lb arrives ready; keep the neck and feet if they come with it, as they enrich the broth.
- Saltspoon and beanA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. "Half a bean" of garlic signals a very small quantity, roughly a piece the size of half a bean, which is a light hand by modern taste.
- Beef marrowOne ounce of marrow scooped from a split beef bone; a butcher will supply marrow bones on request. It melts into the stuffing and helps keep the crumbs moist. Softened butter is a workable stand-in, though it will not give the same silkiness.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, historically grown in the South Carolina lowcountry. Any long-grain white rice behaves the same way here; four ounces is a scant 2/3 cup, and it will take up a good part of the liquid, though a quart is generous for that quantity of rice.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to cover the pan and set it in the oven. Covered and gently simmering is the intent, so a moderate setting -- hot enough to hold a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, or the rice breaks down and the breast dries.
- The hinge: liquid to riceThe rice cooks in the pan with the fowl, so it will only come out right if the pan is covered tightly and undisturbed. Resist adding water; if it looks dry at 40 minutes, add a little hot broth rather than cold water.
- DonenessAn hour is about right for a 3 1/2 lb bird, but check the stuffing itself, not just the thigh. Both should reach 165F, and stuffing packed inside a bird lags well behind the meat.
- ChervilFaintly aniseed, and hard to find fresh. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gets close; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- YieldServes four generously, with the giblet-and-vegetable rice as the only accompaniment needed. The broth left in the pan is worth saving.
Ménagère is French kitchen shorthand for "housewife's" or plain household style -- the label a professional cook attached to a dish built from what the bird itself provided rather than from a stockpot and a garnish list. That is exactly what happens here: the liver, heart and giblets become the stuffing and the cooking broth, the rice cooks in that broth, and very little is discarded. Poule au riz in one form or another was standard French domestic cooking well before this book, valued because an older, tougher hen rewards long moist cooking in a way roasting cannot. The elaborate opening paragraph on eyes, nails and foot skin is the real period marker: a fowl came to the kitchen essentially as it left the yard, and knowing how to dress one was something a cookbook still had to spell out.