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Stuffed Chicken
(Pollo ripieno) For a middle-sized fowl use the following ingredients: two sausages, the liver and giblets of the fowl, eight or ten chestnuts well roasted, some pieces of mushrooms, a taste of nutmeg, one egg. If, instead of a fowl, it is a turkey, double the dose.
Begin by giving the sausages and the giblets half a cooking, moistening them with a little broth if necessary. Season with a little salt and pepper on account of the sausages that already contain them. Remove them and in the gravy that remains put a crumb of bread, in order to obtain with a little broth two tablespoonfuls of thick pap. Skin the sausages, chop the chicken giblets and the giblets and grind everything together with the chestnuts, the egg and the pap; this is the stuffing with which the fowl is to be filled, to be baked afterward. It is more tasty cold than hot, and it can also be cut better. 140
A stuffing of sausage, giblets, chestnuts and bread panade for a roasting bird, written for cooks who already knew how to roast a chicken. The proportions are sound; the vagueness is all in the method.
- The hinge: half-cook, then grindThe sausage and giblets are cooked only partway, moistened with a little broth if needed, before being ground with the other elements, so they finish inside the bird. Cooking them through at this stage risks a drier, crumblier stuffing.
- "Two tablespoonfuls of thick pap"This is a panade: bread crumb swelled in the pan gravy with a splash of broth until it forms a stiff paste. It binds the stuffing along with the egg and carries the fond from the pan. Use soft crumb from a plain loaf, not dried crumbs.
- A translation snag"Chop the chicken giblets and the giblets" is an artifact of the English rendering — the original ingredient list calls for the liver and the giblets, and both go into the grinder.
- SausagesFresh Italian pork sausage, not cured or smoked. Two links is roughly 6-8 oz. The recipe's warning about salt is real: taste the panade before adding any.
- ChestnutsEight or ten roasted chestnuts is about 3 oz peeled. Score, roast at 425F for 20 minutes and peel while hot, or use vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, which are a fair substitute here since they are ground anyway.
- Mushrooms"Some pieces of mushrooms" is unspecified; dried porcini are a likely reading, a small handful soaked, with the strained soaking liquid useful in place of some of the broth, but fresh mushrooms are equally consistent with the text.
- Oven and timeRoast at 350-375F. A 4 lb stuffed chicken takes about 1 hour 45 minutes; the stuffing itself should register 165F, which is the limiting factor, not the breast.
- Serving coldThe instruction that it is better cold is not modesty about leftovers — chilled, the egg-and-panade stuffing sets firm and slices cleanly with the meat. Refrigerate the bird whole and carve it cold, within three days.
- YieldA middle-sized fowl is probably in the region of 3-4 lb, serving four to six. The doubled quantity for turkey suits a moderately sized bird; larger birds are better stuffed loosely or baked with the dressing alongside.
The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, is often connected to the Italian domestic tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene had reached its fifteenth edition by his death in 1911 and taught a newly unified Italy to cook from a single book. Pollo ripieno and its grander relative cappone ripieno belong to the winter table: chestnuts, sausage and a bird are all things a rural household had at once in late autumn, and the stuffed capon is, by regional tradition, associated with Christmas in Emilia and Tuscany. The instruction to eat it cold points to its use as a holiday dish made ahead, sliced for a cold second course or for the following day's meal, and the frugal panade made from the pan gravy is characteristic of the same tradition, in which nothing that has touched the pan is thrown away.