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Stoved Howtowdie
I chicken 1/2 pint (I cup) boiling 6 button onions I blade mace I bay leaf water or stock Forcemeat Gravy 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) butter 5 or 6 eggs 1 bunch herbs Cooked spinach Prepare and stuff a young, plump fowl with forcemeat. Put it into a saucepan with a closefitting lid, add the onions, mace, bay leaf, butter and if liked the herbs. When the fowl has hardened, and been turned, add the boiling water or stock. Fit on the lid very closely and set the saucepan over the fire. One hour will do a small fowl, the heavier ones take longer in proportion to their weight. Have a little seasoned gravy, in which parboil the liver. Poach five or six eggs nicely in this gravy. Dress them on flattened balls of cooked spinach around the fowl. Rub down the liver to thicken the gravy and liquor in which the fowl was cooked, skimming nicely, pour over dish and serve all very hot.
Mushrooms, oysters, forcemeat balls, etc., may be added to enrich it, and chopped celery may be put in the sauce.
I chicken Salt and pepper
A Scots pot-roasted chicken, cooked on the stovetop rather than in the oven, served with poached eggs on spinach and a liver-thickened gravy. The ingredient list has come through with the columns scrambled, so read the method for what actually goes in.
- The garbled ingredient listThe two columns of the original have run together. What the method calls for is one chicken, 6 button (pearl) onions, 1 blade of mace, 1 bay leaf, 4 oz (1/2 cup) butter, a bunch of herbs, 1/2 pint (1 cup) boiling water or stock, forcemeat for stuffing, 5 or 6 eggs, cooked spinach, a little seasoned gravy for poaching, salt and pepper.
- "When the fowl has hardened"This is the hinge. The bird goes into the butter with the aromatics over moderate heat and is turned until the skin has set and coloured; the recipe gives no time for this stage, but ten to fifteen minutes is about right. Only then does the hot liquid go in — the lid is not fitted closely until after it does. Adding the liquid early gives you a pale, steamed chicken with no fond in the pan and a thin gravy.
- ForcemeatNo recipe is given. A traditional stuffing here is oatmeal or breadcrumbs with suet or butter, chopped onion and herbs, bound with egg; a little bacon can go in. The liver is not available for it, as the recipe reserves that for the gravy. Any bread- or grain-based dressing works; keep it loose rather than packed.
- Timing and donenessThe recipe gives one hour for a small fowl and says heavier birds take longer in proportion to their weight; on a modern bird of 4-5 lb reckon on an hour and a half or more. Because it is stuffed, check both the thigh joint and the centre of the stuffing at 165F before serving. The lid must fit tightly and the heat stay low enough that the cup of liquid does not boil away.
- The eggs and spinachThese are the "drappit eggs" of the Scots version. Poach them gently in the seasoned gravy, not in water — the gravy is then poured into the main sauce, so nothing is wasted. The spinach is cooked, squeezed dry, and pressed into flat cakes to sit the eggs on. Do both at the last minute; poached eggs held warm turn hard.
- Rubbing down the liverParboil the liver in the gravy, then push it through a sieve or mash it to a paste and whisk it into the skimmed pan liquor off the boil. It thickens without flour and gives the sauce its character. Let it heat through but do not let it boil hard or it goes grainy.
- YieldFive or six, at one egg each, as the recipe's egg count implies. Nothing is served alongside in the original; boiled potatoes or bread take up the sauce.
Howtowdie is a Scots word for a young hen that has not yet laid, and is generally traced to the Old French hétoudeau or hutaudeau, a pullet — one of the many French words said to have entered Lowland Scots through the long diplomatic and trade traffic between the two countries. "Stoved" is often explained the same way, as a borrowing of étuver, to stew in a covered pot, though the word may as easily come from plain English 'stove'; either way it describes exactly this method, a whole bird browned in butter and then shut under a tight lid with barely a cup of liquid. The poached eggs on spinach, known in Scotland as drappit eggs, are the usual garnish and the reason the dish appears in a book of this kind: a plain pot-roast chicken becomes something worth naming once it arrives ringed with eggs and green cakes of spinach under a liver-thickened sauce. Thickening with a sieved liver rather than flour is an older practice than the roux, and it survives here after flour-and-butter thickenings had become the commoner British habit.