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Stewed Chicken with Mushrooms
After the broth has been drained from the stewed chicken add a pint of mushrooms to the chicken in the kettle before pouring the gravy over it.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a stewed chicken in the pot and a gravy thickened from its broth. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- What the base recipe isThe base stewed chicken is not given here. In general a stewed chicken of this era means a whole bird, jointed or left whole, simmered in barely enough water to cover until tender — roughly 1.5 to 2.5 hours for an older fowl, about an hour for a modern 4-5 lb chicken. The broth is drained off and thickened, usually with flour, to make the gravy.
- A pint of mushroomsThis is a volume measure, not liquid: roughly 8 oz of fresh mushrooms. Canned button mushrooms were commercially available by this period and could be substituted.
- Add them lateThe mushrooms go in after the broth is drained, so they get only the few minutes it takes to finish the gravy. Fresh mushrooms simmered with the bird for an hour give up their liquid and turn grey and slack.
- Better with a preliminary searIf using fresh mushrooms, brown them separately in butter over high heat until their water has cooked off before adding them to the kettle. Dropped in raw they will thin the gravy and taste steamed.
- Canned mushroomsIf you use canned, drain and rinse them; the packing liquid is metallic and will carry into the gravy. They need no cooking at all beyond warming through.
- Seasoning the gravyThe original gives none. Salt and pepper, and sometimes cream, are the usual seasonings for a gravy of this kind. Mushrooms want more salt than you expect, and a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts a gravy that can otherwise taste flat and floury.
- YieldA stewing hen or a 4-5 lb chicken with a pint of mushrooms serves six.
Chicken stewed in its own broth and served under a flour-thickened gravy was one of the great workhorse dishes of the American nineteenth-century kitchen — the standard fate of a hen past laying, whose flesh was too tough for roasting but excellent after long, slow moisture. Mushrooms turned it into company food. Commercial mushroom growing in the United States expanded considerably in the closing decades of the 1800s, particularly around Chester County, Pennsylvania, and canned mushrooms became a pantry staple that let households far from a grower add them to a dish year-round. Here it appears as a brief appendix to the plain stewed chicken rather than as a recipe in its own right — the same dish, dressed for a better occasion.