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January 17
Menu: Prune Cocktail; Brown Fricassee of Chicken; Boiled Rice Baking Powder Biscuit; Apple and Celery Salad; Mince Pie; Coffee Brown Fricassee of Chicken-Draw, singe, and joint chicken. Put 4 tablespoons Crisco in saucepan; when brown, put in chicken. Stir until every piece is nicely browned, then add 2 tablespoons flour, stir again, add 1 pint boiling water or stock, stir until it boils; add 1 teaspoon of salt. Cover, and let simmer gently until tender, then add 1 teaspoon onion juice, and little black pepper. Put neck-piece, heart, liver, gizzard, and back pieces in center of dish; put 2 pieces of breast on top, second joints on one side of plate, legs crossed on other, and wing at each end of plate. Pour sauce over, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and serve.
A straightforward braise in the old sense of "brown fricassee" — the bird is browned first, then stewed in its own thickened gravy. Most of what needs translating is the butchery language and the plating.
- Draw, singe, jointDrawing means removing the innards, singeing means burning off pinfeathers over a flame. A supermarket chicken arrives already drawn and plucked; you need only cut it into eight or ten pieces and keep the giblets, which the recipe uses on the platter.
- Crisco and the panFour tablespoons of shortening is right for browning a whole cut-up bird; any neutral fat with a high smoke point works the same way. "When brown" most likely refers to the fat itself taking colour — heat it until it shimmers and just begins to smell nutty rather than waiting for a visible brown.
- A pint of liquidTwo cups. Add it boiling, as the recipe directs, and stir as it comes to the boil. Stock gives a far better sauce than water.
- Simmer time"Until tender" is 35 to 45 minutes for a modern 3½–4 lb broiler, covered and barely bubbling. Breast pieces are done well before the legs; lift them out at about 25 minutes and return them to warm through if you want them moist.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; you will need far less than a whole onion for the teaspoon called for. It was a period trick for onion flavour without visible pieces. A teaspoon of grated onion added at the start works if you don't mind the texture.
- DonenessCook chicken to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh. Bone-in dark meat is more pleasant nearer 175F, and braising will not dry it out.
- The platingThe arrangement — giblets and back in the centre, breast on top, thighs and crossed legs at the sides, wings at each end — is a reconstruction of the bird on the platter. It is optional, but it explains why the recipe insists on jointing rather than chopping.
- YieldOne chicken serves four. The sauce is thin by modern standards; if you want it heavier, uncover for the last ten minutes and let it reduce.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade cooks that hydrogenated cottonseed oil belonged in dishes they already knew, so its recipes are mostly standard American cookery with the shortening substituted in — here for the butter or lard a fricassee would ordinarily have been browned in. The "Calendar of Dinners" section assigned a menu to every day of the year, a common device in early twentieth-century household books that spared the housekeeper the daily decision; this one falls on January 18. Fricassee comes into English from French in the sixteenth century, and by the nineteenth the American kitchen had settled into two versions: the white fricassee, in which the chicken is stewed without colour and finished with cream, and the brown, in which it is seared first. The elaborate reassembly of the jointed bird on the platter suggests, though the recipe says no more than this, a style of service in which the platter itself was carried to the table and carving had already been done in the kitchen.