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Chicken Fricassee
3 pounds chicken 1 onion 2 cloves bay leaf 1 teaspoon salt cup chopped salt pork fat or other fat cup flour Singe, draw and disjoint a 3-pound chicken. Wash and rinse carefully. Put into a saucepan with 1 quart of water, 1 sliced onion with 2 cloves pressed into it, bay leaf and salt. Simmer slowly until tender. Remove chicken, dredge the pieces generously with the flour, salt and pepper, and brown in the salt pork fat or other fat in a frying pan. When the pieces of chicken are nicely browned on both sides, add the stock in which the chicken has been cooked. If the gravy is not thick enough, add flour thickening to it. Season to taste. Arrange the browned chicken on a platter. Pour the gravy over it. Surround with a border of boiled rice. This is a good way to utilize fowls which need long, slow cooking to make them tender.
A two-stage fricassee: the bird is poached until tender, then floured and browned, and the poaching liquid becomes the gravy. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the quantities and assumptions belong to a kitchen that bought birds whole and unplucked.
- The hinge: brown after poaching, not beforeDredging a wet-poached bird in flour and frying it is what gives this dish its color and its thickened gravy in one step. Pat the pieces dry before flouring or the coating slides off in the fat.
- "Singe, draw and disjoint"Singeing burned off residual pinfeathers over a flame and drawing meant removing the viscera. A supermarket chicken arrives done; buy a 3 lb bird cut into eight pieces and skip straight to the rinse.
- Fowl versus broilerThe closing line is the point of the recipe. A "fowl" was a spent laying hen, tough and full of flavor. A modern stewing hen needs 1.5 to 2 hours of simmering; an ordinary 3 lb broiler will be tender in 35 to 45 minutes and will fall apart if pushed further.
- Quantities for fat and flourThe ingredient list gives "cup" for both the salt pork fat and the flour with no fraction attached; the fractions have dropped out of the text and the original amounts are unrecoverable. Something in the region of 1/4 cup fat in the pan and 1/2 cup flour for dredging will do, with a spoonful held back for thickening.
- Salt pork fatDiced salt pork rendered in the frying pan, the solids lifted out and the fat kept for frying. Bacon fat, lard or a neutral oil all work; if you use bacon expect a smoked note the original would not have had.
- Onion stuck with clovesTwo whole cloves pressed into the onion, not ground clove. The recipe does not say what becomes of the onion and bay; lift or strain them out before the stock goes into the pan as gravy.
- The simmer, not a boilA quart of water for 3 lb of chicken barely covers it. Keep it at a bare tremble and turn the pieces once; a rolling boil toughens the breast and clouds the stock you are about to serve as gravy.
- GravyAfter the chicken is browned, the stock will be thin. Reduce it hard in the frying pan to concentrate flavor before deciding whether it needs a flour slurry, and taste for salt only at the end — salt pork, the poaching salt and reduction all push it up.
- YieldAbout four servings with the rice border; allow roughly 3 cups of cooked rice if you want to ring a large platter.
Fricassee entered English cookery from French, from a cooking verb of uncertain origin; the familiar gloss of "cut up" reflects a disputed derivation rather than settled fact. In use it came to mean, fairly consistently, poultry cut up and cooked in liquid with a sauce made from that liquid — as distinct from a roast or a plain boiled fowl. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to split it into two camps: the white fricassee, finished with cream and never browned, and the brown fricassee like this one, where flour and fat do the work. Households that kept hens had to cook out birds past laying, and a tough three-pound fowl was not a roasting proposition; the long simmer broke down the connective tissue and the frying pan supplied the appearance of a roast. The rice border is a period plating convention, found around everything from creamed chicken to curries, and it served the same purpose as mashed potato — stretching a small quantity of meat and catching the gravy.