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To Cook a Fowl
Clean a fowl as for roasting, and instead of stuffing, place inside the giblets, a small onion and a quarter of a pound of breakfast bacon; boil until very tender, and serve with bread sauce; save the liquor in which it was boiled, and add the next day the remains of the cold chicken, the bones and all, and boil for twenty minutes; remove the bones by straining through a colander; pick out the small pieces of meat and season, adding rice if liked, and there will be two dinners from one chicken.
A boiling fowl stretched across two meals, which is the whole point of the recipe. The instructions assume a bird and a kitchen routine that have both largely disappeared.
- What a "fowl" wasNot a young roaster but a mature laying hen past her productive life — tough, fat, and deeply flavoured, which is why she is boiled rather than roasted. A supermarket chicken is a few weeks old and will fall apart long before a fowl would be tender. Look for a stewing hen or boiling fowl from a butcher; failing that, use a 4-5 lb roasting chicken and expect a thinner broth.
- "Boil" means simmerAn actual rolling boil shreds the flesh and clouds the stock. Bring the pot up, skim, then hold it at a bare tremble — 1½ to 2 hours for a modern chicken, 2½ to 3½ for a genuine boiling fowl. It is done when a leg joint pulls loose easily.
- Breakfast baconIn this period the term generally meant thin-sliced streaky bacon, likely cured more heavily with salt than most bacon sold today. A quarter pound of modern bacon adds fat and savour but probably less salt, so taste the broth before seasoning at the end rather than the beginning.
- The gibletsHeart, gizzard and neck go in as directed and enrich the liquor. Many cooks leave the liver out, as it can turn the broth bitter and muddy over a long simmer. Cook it separately or omit it.
- Cover the birdThe recipe assumes a deep pot and enough water to submerge the fowl. Too much water and the second-day soup is weak; aim to cover by an inch, no more, and top up only if the bird breaks the surface.
- Bread sauceThe expected accompaniment and not made in this entry: milk infused with an onion stuck with cloves, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs, finished with butter and a scrape of nutmeg. Any standard version will do; it wants to be thick enough to hold a spoon mark.
- The second dinnerCool the liquor quickly — decant it into a shallow container rather than leaving the pot on the stove overnight — refrigerate, and lift the fat off before reheating. Bring it fully back to a boil the next day. If rice goes in, add it to the strained broth and give it 15-20 minutes; the twenty-minute boil in the original is for the carcass, not the grain.
- YieldA boiled fowl with bread sauce should serve roughly four to six; the following day's broth with the picked meat and rice makes about four bowls.
This is thrift written as a recipe: a single bird producing a boiled dinner and then a soup, with the carcass boiled again to extract the last of it. Boiled fowl with bread sauce was a familiar dish in English and Anglo-American cooking through the nineteenth century, and hens kept for laying were commonly killed only when they stopped producing — meat too tough for the oven but suited to long, gentle immersion. Bread sauce is a long-surviving British preparation, thickened with breadcrumbs rather than flour or egg in a manner inherited from medieval cookery, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was associated chiefly with poultry. The closing line — "there will be two dinners from one chicken" — is the voice of the period's domestic-economy literature, aimed at a household cook who was judged on waste as much as on flavour.