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Chicken with Ham
(Pollo in porchetta) Fill a chicken with thin strips of ham, about half an inch wide. Add three cloves (or sections) of garlic, two little bunches of fennel and a few grains of pepper. Season outside with salt and pepper and cook in a saucepan with butter, or preferably bake in the oven. Sausages cut lengthwise and previously skinned can be substituted for the ham. 142
A two-line recipe that assumes a cook who already knows how to roast a bird. The flavour hinges entirely on the fennel, which is not the vegetable bulb sold under that name today.
- The fennel"Two little bunches of fennel" means wild fennel — the feathery green fronds and soft stalks, ideally with the seed heads. Fronds from a supermarket fennel bulb plus a teaspoon of crushed fennel seed give a close approximation; the bulb itself is too watery and mild for this.
- Ham stripsUse an unsmoked or lightly smoked cured ham such as prosciutto crudo or a thick-cut cooked ham, sliced into half-inch batons. They go into the cavity along with the garlic and fennel.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Roast at 400F for the first 20 minutes to set the skin, then 350F until done — roughly 20 minutes per pound for a 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird, about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours total.
- Doneness165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone. Judging by clear juices alone, as period cooks did, tends to overshoot and dry the breast.
- The saucepan method"Cook in a saucepan with butter" is pot-roasting: a heavy lidded pot, butter, low heat, turned occasionally for about an hour. It gives moister meat but pallid skin, which may be why the author prefers the oven.
- Sausage substitutionSkinned Italian sausage split lengthwise works, but it is raw meat sitting in a cavity — it needs the same 165F as the bird, so check the stuffing itself with a thermometer rather than assuming.
- Garlic"Three cloves (or sections)" looks like a clarification that cloves here means garlic segments, not the spice. Leave them whole and lightly crushed; they perfume the cavity without turning bitter.
- YieldOne chicken serves four. Rest it 10 to 15 minutes before carving, and spoon the ham, garlic and fennel out of the cavity as a garnish rather than serving it as stuffing.
Pollo in porchetta borrows its name and its seasoning from porchetta, the boned, herb-stuffed roast pig of central Italy — Umbria, Lazio and the Marches all claim versions. Anything cooked in porchetta means treated that way: opened out, packed with garlic, wild fennel and pepper, and roasted, and the formula was applied to rabbit, lamb and, as here, chicken. Wild fennel grows freely along roadsides through much of Italy and was the free seasoning of the countryside, which is why it appears so casually as "two little bunches" with no further explanation. Maria Gentile's Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking, and its recipes keep this telegraphic regional brevity — the ham-or-sausage substitution at the end is the sort of note a cook passes to another cook rather than a fully specified instruction.