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August 13
Menu: Roast Fowl with Chestnuts and; Mushrooms.; Franconia Potatoes Shell Beans; Lettuce and Tomato Salad; Peach Short-Cake Coffee; Roast Fowl with Chestnuts and Mushrooms-Stuff 1 large or 2 small fowls with chestnuts or mushroom stuffing, truss it, brush with melted Crisco, dust with salt and pepper, and put on a rack in pan and in a hot oven until beginning to brown, reduce heat, and cook 1 or 2 hours, basting often. Add to pan 1/2 cup hot water, 1 slice salt pork, diced, tiny bit bay leaf, 1 clove, and sprig of parsley. If with mushrooms pour over little sherry mixed with cream. When done place fowl on platter, pour off all fat in pan but 3 tablespoons, add 2 tablespoons flour and slightly color, add 1 cup stock from giblets cooked with 1 slice of salt pork, salt and pepper, a little lemon juice, and minced giblets. Serve surrounded with chestnut or mushroom puree put through a pastry bag and tube in roses. Place a small piece of canned red pepper on each rose and serve gravy in boat.
This is one course from a dated dinner menu, written in the compressed shorthand the book uses throughout. The bones of the method are sound; the vocabulary and the oven work need translating.
- "Fowl" is not a roasting chickenIn the cookery of this period a fowl was a mature laying hen, tougher and stronger in flavor than a young roaster. A supermarket roaster of 4 to 5 lb is a different bird; cook to temperature rather than to the recipe's stated hour or two.
- Oven temperaturesA hot oven here is 425-450F, held only until the skin takes color, perhaps 15-20 minutes. The reduced heat is 325-350F. Finish when the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F and the stuffing in the cavity reads the same.
- Stuffed birds cook unevenlyThe hinge of the whole dish: a packed cavity slows the center badly, so the breast overcooks before the stuffing is safe. Stuff loosely, or bake the stuffing alongside in a dish and moisten it with pan juices.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, and any neutral solid or liquid fat does the same job for brushing the skin. Melted butter browns better if you are not bound to the original.
- ChestnutsFresh chestnuts must be scored, roasted or boiled, and peeled while hot before they will mash or stuff anything. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are the practical substitute and go straight into the stuffing or the puree.
- The pan additionsThe half cup of hot water, salt pork, bay, clove and parsley go in after the heat is reduced, not at the start, or the water simply steams away. Scrape the browned pan residue into the gravy; that is where the flavor is.
- Giblet stockSimmer the neck, heart and gizzard (not the liver, which turns bitter over long cooking) with the slice of salt pork for about an hour while the bird roasts. Mince the giblets fine for the finished gravy.
- "Canned red pepper"This means canned pimiento, cut into small diamonds or dots as a garnish on each piped rose of puree. Jarred roasted red pepper, blotted dry, works the same way.
- Piping the pureeFor the puree to hold a rose shape it must be stiff -- chestnuts or mushrooms mashed with very little cream and a knob of fat, then warmed through. Anything looser will slump on the platter.
- YieldAs one course of a full menu, one large fowl would probably serve four to six, two small ones six to eight; the recipe itself gives no number.
The page title belongs to the dessert and drink of the same dinner -- this is the August 14 entry in the book's "Calendar of Dinners," a year of complete menus written to persuade households that Crisco could stand in for butter and lard at every point in the meal. Roast fowl with chestnut stuffing and a piped puree garnish is late-Victorian and Edwardian company cooking scaled down for a middle-class kitchen: the pastry bag, the giblet gravy in a boat, the pimiento dot on each rose all come out of the professional garnishing vocabulary that American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s absorbed from French service. The salt pork in both the pan and the giblet stock is the older, thriftier layer underneath, supplying the fat and savor that a lean bird lacks. Chestnuts were then a common and cheap autumn ingredient in the eastern United States; the blight that destroyed the American chestnut was identified in New York in 1904 and had swept much of its range within a few decades, so a recipe like this reads differently now than it did when it was written.