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April 15
Menu: Stewed Chicken; Baking Powder Biscuit; Spinach; Buttered Parsnips; Celery and Orange Salad; Cheese Relish Ribbon Jelly; a; Coffee Stewed Chicken-Draw, singe, and joint stewing chicken. Season pieces with pepper and salt and cover with boiling water. Cover and stew gently until tender. Remove chicken. Place pieces in a colander on a plate in oven to drain, and thicken gravy by adding 1 tablespoon flour rubbed with 1 tablespoon Crisco. Add salt and pepper to taste, a little chopped parsley and 1 cup milk. Beat an egg until light; pour on it part of gravy, beating carefully to prevent lumps; return to remainder of gravy; bring to boil and pour over chicken.
The page begins mid-sentence — the opening line about cutting up a fowl is on the previous page — but what survives is a complete method for old-fashioned fricasseed chicken with an egg-and-milk gravy. A few conventions of the 1913 kitchen need translating.
- The missing first stepThe recipe as printed starts partway through: a chicken has already been cut into serving pieces. Season the pieces with pepper and salt, cover with boiling water, and proceed from there.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, and this is one of its plainest uses — the fat rubbed into flour to thicken the gravy. Any solid or liquid fat works; butter gives more flavour, and the tablespoon of fat to tablespoon of flour ratio is a standard small roux.
- "Stew gently until tender"For a supermarket chicken that is 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer; an older stewing hen wants 1½ to 2 hours. Keep the liquid trembling rather than rolling, or the breast meat shreds and dries out even while submerged.
- The colander in the ovenThis is a holding step, not a cooking one: it drains the pieces and keeps them hot while the gravy is finished. A low oven — the book gives no temperature — with the plate underneath to catch drips, does what was intended.
- Tempering the eggThis is the hinge of the dish. Beat the egg, then pour a ladleful of the hot gravy into the egg while whisking — not the reverse — before returning the mixture to the pan. Adding a cold egg straight to hot gravy gives you threads of scrambled egg.
- "Bring to boil" — treat with cautionOnce the egg is in, a true boil will curdle the sauce and leave it grainy. Heat it just until it thickens and coats the spoon, around 175 to 180F, and take it off. Some period recipes say boil where modern practice would say scald.
- Gravy quantityAfter stewing you will have more broth than one tablespoon of roux can thicken. Use only a modest amount of it for the gravy — the cup of milk goes in on top of that — and save the rest for soup.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce hydrogenated cottonseed oil to cooks who had only ever used butter, lard or suet, and the recipe section was compiled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. A "Calendar of Dinners" — associated with the companion issue of that name rather than demonstrably the structure of the 1913 book itself — arranged dishes by date through the year, so a housekeeper could work forward day by day without planning. Fricassee itself is much older than the book: the word is traditionally traced to the French fricasser, said to mean to cut up and fry or stew, though the derivation is uncertain, and by the eighteenth century it meant, in English kitchens, a jointed fowl stewed in a little liquid and finished with a pale sauce. The egg-and-milk enrichment here is the standard "white fricassee" finish, distinguished from the browned version by the fact that the chicken is never seared. What is new in 1913 is only the fat rubbed into the flour.