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Chicken Broth
Cut 2 pound chicken into pieces; cover with 2 pints cold water; simmer three hours or until meat is tender. Remove meat, cool stock, remove fat, reheat and add cup cooked rice. Season and serve. 3 pounds lamb, cut from forequarter
A plain invalid-cookery broth: chicken, water, time. The only real technique is the overnight-style chill that lets you lift the fat off cleanly, and the only real difficulty is that the printed text has lost some of its fractions.
- The stray last line"3 pounds lamb, cut from forequarter" -- does not belong to the chicken broth; it appears to be the opening of the following recipe in the section and can be ignored here.
- Missing fractions"add cup cooked rice" almost certainly stood as a fraction in the original type, most likely a half cup. Treat the rice as a garnish rather than a measured ingredient and add it to taste; a half cup in two pints of broth is plenty.
- Choice of birdA 2 lb bird here means a small fowl or a portion of an older stewing hen, which would account for the long three-hour simmer. A modern supermarket broiler will be falling apart well before that; wings, backs and thighs give more gelatin than breast and are the better buy.
- Two pints of waterThat is 4 cups, and after three hours of simmering you will have noticeably less. Keep the lid ajar rather than off, and top up with hot water if the meat is not staying covered.
- Simmer, do not boilThe hinge of the whole thing. A broth held at a bare shiver stays clear; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the liquid and makes it cloudy and greasy, which defeats the point of the later skimming.
- Cooling and skimmingThe recipe says only to cool the stock and lift the fat; chilling it until the fat sets into a liftable disc is the reliable way to do that. Cool it quickly in a shallow container and refrigerate rather than leaving the pot standing.
- Season at the end"Season" here means salt, and the recipe places it after the meat is out and the broth reheated, not at the start. A squeeze of lemon or a little parsley does more for a dull broth than extra salt.
- YieldRoughly 2 to 3 cups of finished broth, depending on how much you top up, or two invalid-sized servings. Leftover boiled fowl was commonly used up minced in sandwiches, croquettes or a creamed dish.
Invalid cookery was a standing chapter in household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, when convalescence happened at home and the cook, not a hospital kitchen, fed the patient. Chicken broth headed the list because it was thought to be nourishment in its most digestible form, and because a slowly simmered fowl was something almost any household could produce. Modern nutrition takes a cooler view of how much a clear broth actually delivers, though the gelatin and salt are genuinely easy on someone who cannot face solid food. Books of this kind carried these chapters partly as instruction and partly as reassurance: the section sits alongside pages on feeding infants and the sick, in an era when insurance companies employed visiting nurses and distributed household advice at scale.