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Chicken Pot Pie
Before placing in the pot cut a chicken in pieces suitable for serving at table. Separate the joints neatly and divide the breast into three compact pieces. Lay the gizzard, heart, wings and legs at the bottom of the pot, then put in the neck and bony pieces, reserving the second joints and breasts for the top. Use a quart of boiling water for a full grown chicken or young fowl; cook until tender. Salt it while cooking. Have plenty of gravy; then mix together two tablespoonfuls of butter and three of flour, add to gravy. Have ready your dough made the same as baking powder biscuit, only leave out the shortening and mix with milk. Cut out in small biscuit and drop them in gravy while boiling, lay them around on top of meat. Cover and boil twenty minutes. Turn out on hot platter and serve immediately. Do not take up with fork or spoon, but just turn out gently on platter, else it will fall.
A stovetop pot pie in the older American sense: no pastry crust, just biscuit dumplings steamed on top of a stew. The whole thing hinges on the lid staying on for the full twenty minutes.
- Do not lift the lidThe dumplings finish under the cover, with trapped steam doing much of the work even though they are dropped into the boiling gravy. Lifting the cover drops the steam and can leave the tops gummy and pale; check at twenty minutes and not before.
- Layering has a purposeGizzard, heart, wings, legs and bony pieces go in first because they need the longest cooking and the most contact with the bottom of the pot. Breast and thighs on top poach gently in steam and stay moist.
- "A full grown chicken or young fowl"A whole bird, cut up; the recipe gives no weight, and birds of the period were often smaller than a modern supermarket chicken. An older stewing hen may need well over an hour to reach tenderness, a young modern bird considerably less. Cook until tender, as the recipe says.
- A quart of water is not muchOne quart barely covers a whole cut-up bird in a wide pot. Use a deep, narrow pot with a tight lid, or add enough water to cover and accept a thinner gravy that you can reduce later.
- Thickening the gravyTwo tablespoons butter to three of flour makes a roux for roughly a quart of liquid. Cook the paste a minute or two before whisking it in, or stir it in as beurre manie off the boil, then simmer to lose the raw flour taste.
- The dumpling doughBaking powder biscuit without shortening, bound with milk. The recipe gives no quantities; something like 2 cups flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 3/4 tsp salt and about 3/4 cup milk would answer. It should be soft, but firm enough to cut out, as the recipe directs.
- Salt it while cookingSalting the broth from the start is the only seasoning step in the recipe, and the dumplings absorb their flavor from it. About 1.5 tsp per quart of water is a reasonable starting point.
- Turning it outThe instruction not to lift with fork or spoon is sound. Slide the whole mass onto a warmed deep platter in one motion; the dumplings are fragile until they cool slightly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a whole cut-up bird with its dumplings would serve a family of about six.
Chicken pot pie in nineteenth-century America was as often a boiled dish as a baked one, and this version shows the older form clearly: the "pie" is the dough on top, cooked by steam over the stew rather than browned in an oven. Cooks who kept birds for eggs ate them at the end of their laying life, when the meat was tough and the flavor deep, which is why the recipe assumes long, patient simmering and why the bony parts are given pride of place at the bottom of the pot. The biscuit dough here goes without shortening, and the dumplings take their fat from the buttered gravy they sit in. Dishes cooked entirely in one covered pot on top of the stove remained an everyday staple of American cooking.