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Sudden Death
I broiling chicken I oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) butter Salt and pepper to taste Tomato sauce Chop the head off a live young fowl, and let it bleed. Draw the chicken and plunge it into a pan of boiling water, when the skin and feathers will come off all together. Split the chicken in half; broil it over a clear fire, and keep turning "Stoved Howtowdie" is a savory way of serving young fowl with poached eggs and spinach "Country Captains illustrate an unusual way of recooking cold chicken in a batter containing curry
The page as printed is damaged: the broiling instruction breaks off mid-sentence, and the last two lines are stray fragments from neighbouring entries on howtowdie and country captain. What survives is a complete method in outline, and the outline is the point — a bird killed, plucked, split and grilled within the hour.
- You will not do the first stepSlaughtering and dressing a bird at the kitchen door is legal in many places but is a separate skill with its own hygiene requirements. Buy a bird already dressed; nothing later in the method depends on having done it yourself.
- "A broiling chicken"A young bird of about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb, what a butcher now sells as a small spring chicken (a poussin is smaller still, around 1 lb). It serves one or two. A modern 4 lb roaster will not cook through by this method before the outside blackens.
- Butter1 oz is 2 tablespoons, as the recipe itself notes. It does not say how the butter is used; for a split bird over a fire it would most plausibly be for brushing the cut surfaces and skin as it cooks.
- ScaldingThe recipe calls for boiling water, and many old kitchens did use it, but water at a full boil can set the skin and tear it when the feathers are pulled. Scalding for plucking is more usually done at roughly 140-150F for under a minute.
- Split it properlyCut down either side of the backbone and flatten the bird, or halve it through the breast; either way press it flat so the thickness is even. An unflattened split bird cooks unevenly at the thigh.
- "A clear fire"Glowing coals with no flame and no smoke — flame scorches the fat as it renders. Under a domestic broiler, use the highest setting with the bird 4-5 inches from the element, or grill over coals that have burned down to grey.
- Timing and donenessBone side first, then skin side, turning often as the recipe says: roughly 10-12 minutes a side for a 2 lb bird. Cook to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, joint moving freely and juices clear.
- Tomato sauceNo quantity or recipe is given. A plain reduced tomato sauce, about 1/2 cup per bird, served alongside rather than poured over, keeps the skin crisp.
"Sudden death" is a long-standing cook's nickname rather than a dish in its own right — a fowl killed, plucked and grilled in a single unbroken sequence, with none of the hanging or ageing that a butcher's bird gets. The trick of plunging the whole bird into hot water so that "the skin and feathers come off all together" is scalding rather than dry-plucking, standard on farms wherever birds were killed in quantity; it works because heat loosens the follicles, and the broiling follows immediately because the bird has only just been killed. The company it keeps in this book — stoved howtowdie, country captain, both ways of stretching or reviving a fowl — shows how much of chicken cookery in this period was organised around the age of the bird and how recently it had died.