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Chicken with Sausages
(Pollo colle salsicce) Chop fine half an onion and put it in a saucepan with a piece of butter and four or five slices of ham, half an inch wide. Over these ingredients place a whole chicken, season with pepper and a little salt and place on the fire. Brown it on all sides and, when the onion is all melted, add water or broth and three or four sausages freshly made. Let it cook on a low fire, seeing that the sauce remains liquid and does not dry up.
A whole-bird braise done entirely on the stovetop, in the style of a Tuscan in casseruola. The original gives no weights, no times and no pot size, so the judgement calls are all yours.
- The hinge: keep the liquid liquidThe instruction to see that the sauce "remains liquid and does not dry up" is the whole method. Reckon on roughly 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter for a whole bird over low heat; the recipe says nothing about a lid, so watch the pan and add a splash of broth whenever the level drops, or the ham and onion base will scorch and turn bitter.
- The potTake "saucepan" to mean a deep, heavy vessel just wide enough to hold the bird; something in the 5-to-6-quart range works, though the original specifies nothing. Too wide and the small amount of liquid spreads thin and evaporates; too narrow and the chicken will not brown.
- Chicken size and donenessA 3½ to 4 lb bird suits the method. Cook until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165F; a whole braised chicken often runs to 175F at the thigh before the breast is done, which is fine in a moist pot.
- The hamSlices "half an inch wide" reads as batons cut from a thick slice, not deli ham. Use prosciutto crudo or pancetta — the point is cured pork fat to start the sofritto, so an American smoked ham will pull the dish somewhere else entirely.
- "Freshly made" sausagesFresh Italian pork sausage without fennel-heavy seasoning, or a plain salsiccia luganega. Do not prick them. Add them, as written, only after the liquid goes in, so they poach rather than split; 25 to 30 minutes in the sauce is enough.
- Browning firstGet the onion, butter and ham going, then brown the bird on every side over medium-high heat before any liquid is added — turning a whole chicken in a hot pot is easiest with two wooden spoons or a folded towel in each hand.
- Salt"A little salt" is deliberate: the ham and the sausages both salt the sauce as they cook. Season lightly at the start and correct at the end.
- Yield and servingServes about four. Carve the bird, cut the sausages into lengths, and spoon the pan juices over; polenta, white beans or bread suit it better than pasta.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was published in English for American readers at a moment when Italian home cooking was still little known outside immigrant kitchens, and its recipes keep the terse, cue-based style of Italian manuals of the period — you are told the onion should be "all melted" rather than given a clock time, on the assumption that a cook can see and smell for herself. The dish sits with the pollo in casseruola sort of preparation, in which a whole bird is stewed slowly with cured pork rather than roasted; a covered pot over embers or a low flame did much of the work an oven does now. Adding fresh sausages to a chicken braise plausibly stretches one bird further while seasoning the sauce at the same time — the logic that also puts sausage into a pot of beans.