Chicken Stew
Stewing, when properly done, is the most perfect method of cooking chickens that have reached a greater age than one year, and although, as ordinarily served, it is 'neither toothsome nor inviting, yet when prepared according to the following recipe it makes as delicious a dish as desired: Before placing in the pot to stew, cut a chicken Separate the joints in pieces suitable for serving at table. neatly and divide the breast into three or four compact pieces. Lay the gizzard, heart and 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 pint of boiling water for a full grown chicken, boil rapidly a few minutes, then add a tablespoonful each of butter and flour stirred to a smooth paste, cover close and simmer gently but unceasingly till tender. Drain into a bowl all the broth, and set the pot, with the chicken undisturbed in it, upon the stove. If the broth is too oily, skim from it as much grease as desired, add a tablespoonful of flour stirred with two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream or milk to a paste, and season highly, as the gravy must give seasoning to the chicken. Pour the seasoned gravy over the chicken, and simmer for two minutes, and serve meat_and gravy together. Pursuing essentially the same method, stewed chicken can be varied by using less water and more cream or milk, by browning the chicken either before or after it is cooked, and adding oysters, mushrooms, truffles, etc. By these slight and seemingly unimportant variations it becomes chicken fricassee, chicken saute, chicken marengo, etc., until a dozen or more dishes with fanciful foreign names are artistically evolved from a very simple, unpretentious stewed chicken. A chicken a year old requires stewing for at least an hour, and each year added to the life of the fowl necessitates an additional hour's stewing.
A method piece as much as a recipe: the whole point is a tough old bird cooked slowly in very little liquid, with the gravy built at the end. Two things need translating for a modern cook — the bird itself, and the timing.
- The hinge: very little liquid, tight lidA pint of water for a whole chicken is not a typo. The bird is meant to steam and braise in its own juices, not swim, so the pot must have a genuinely close-fitting lid and the heat must stay at a bare tremble. Lift the lid often and you will boil the pan dry.
- The bird has changedThis is written for a stewing hen — a spent layer of one to several years, all connective tissue and flavour. A supermarket broiler is slaughtered at six to nine weeks and will fall apart long before the hour mark. Look for a bird sold as a fowl, stewing hen or poule at a butcher or halal market if you want the dish as intended.
- TimingsThe rule of an hour per year of age applies to real stewing hens; expect 2 to 3 hours for one, tested by the leg meat pulling from the bone. A modern 4 lb roasting chicken jointed the same way is done in 45 to 60 minutes, and the breast pieces should come out sooner than that.
- Layering the potGizzard, heart, wings and legs at the bottom, breast on top, is deliberate: the lower layer sits in the hot liquid, the upper cooks in steam. Keep this even with a young bird — it is the simplest way to avoid dry breast meat.
- "Second joints"Nineteenth-century American butchery for the thighs. The drumsticks are the "legs."
- Sweet creamUnsoured fresh cream, as opposed to the cultured or clabbered cream common in a farm kitchen. Any modern heavy or single cream works.
- Season highlyTake this literally. The chicken itself goes into the pot unseasoned, so the finished gravy has to carry salt and pepper for the whole dish. Taste the gravy on its own and push it past what seems right in the bowl.
- The flour pasteButter and flour worked smooth is the mixture usually called beurre manié, though here it goes in near the start rather than at the finish; the later flour stirred with cream or milk is a plain slurry doing the same thickening job. Work either one smooth before it meets the hot broth to keep it from lumping.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a full-grown fowl treated this way would reasonably stretch to four to six with rice, noodles or dumplings to take the gravy.
Stewing was a common fate of a hen that had stopped laying, and in a household that kept poultry such birds would have accounted for a good deal of the chicken eaten; roasting birds were young, seasonal and comparatively costly. What is interesting here is the author's editorial aside: fricassee, sauté and chicken Marengo are dismissed as the same stewed chicken under "fanciful foreign names." That tone recurs in American domestic writing of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pitched to housekeepers who might be put off by French menu terms and reassured that the technique behind them was already in their kitchens. The advice is technically sound, too: a fricassee is indeed a white stew of jointed poultry finished with a cream liaison, which is very close to what this recipe describes.