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Roast Chicken with Watercress
Prepare and roast a tender Philadelphia chicken. Dress it on a hot dish, decorate with a little watercress and serve.
The instruction assumes a cook who already knows how to roast a bird, so almost everything of substance is left out. Here is what the original takes for granted.
- "Philadelphia chicken"A market term of the period for a plump, specially fattened young bird from the Pennsylvania farms that supplied the eastern cities; the birds were reputed to be milk-fed, though that is trade lore as much as record. Any good 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 lb roasting chicken stands in for it; an air-chilled bird will brown better than a water-chilled one.
- "Prepare"At the time this meant singeing off pinfeathers, drawing the bird, and trussing it with string so the legs and wings stay against the body. Modern birds arrive drawn and singed; trussing is still worth doing, since it keeps the breast from drying while the thighs finish.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. Start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 375F for the remainder — roughly 15 minutes per pound total for a 4 lb bird, or about an hour.
- The number that mattersTake the bird to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, clear of the bone. Period cooks judged by clear juices from a fork prick, a test that gives no warning before the meat is past done.
- RestingRest the chicken 10 to 15 minutes before it goes to the dish. The recipe's "hot dish" is not decoration: a cold platter chills the skin and congeals the fat that should stay glossy.
- The watercressThe recipe asks only for a little, as decoration. In the French treatment the cress is set as a loose bouquet beside the bird, picked over, dried, and dressed at the last moment with nothing more than a little lemon juice and salt.
- YieldA 4 lb bird serves four as a main course. The recipe calls for no gravy and says nothing of the pan juices.
The pairing is often associated with the French poulet rôti au cresson, in which a bouquet of raw watercress is set beside the finished bird so its pepperiness and the acid dressing cut the fat of the skin and pan juices. The "Philadelphia chicken" of the title is the American graft onto that idea. Through the nineteenth century Philadelphia's poultry markets had a national reputation for milk-fed capons and young chickens, and the name appeared on menus as a mark of quality much as Bresse does in France. The brevity of the entry is itself a period signal: this is filed as a technique a competent cook already possesses, with only the garnish worth writing down.