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To Stew a Chicken
Cut the prepared chicken in pieces suitable for serving. Separate the first and second joint and wing joints, divide the breast into four compact pieces, and separate the neck, back, etc. Put the gizzard, heart, wings and legs in the bottom of the kettle, then put in the back and neck and bony pieces, reserving the second joints and breast for the top. Add a pint of boiling water for each full grown fowl, cover the kettle closely, and after it has cooked or stewed a few minutes, add a tablespoonful each of butter and flour stirred to a smooth paste. Let it cook slowly, but constantly, until the fowl is tender, which can be ascertained by examining the pieces on top. If the top pieces are found to be sufficiently cooked; those beneath will be also, as in placing the pieces in the kettle, those requiring the most cooking were put at the bottom so as to be subjected to the greatest heat. A one-year-old fowl will stew in about an hour and a half, and each added year, an additional hour's cooking. When the fowl has stewed until perfectly tender, drain into a bowl all the liquid, and set the kettle, with the pieces undisturbed in it, upon the back of the stove. If the broth is too oily, skim from it as much grease as you wish, then add to it a spoonful of flour stirred to a smooth paste with a spoonful of butter, and season highly with salt and pepper, as this gravy must season the entire fowl. After the gravy has been seasoned, pour it over the fowl in the kettle and simmer gently for fourteen minutes, then serve fowl and gravy together on the same platter. Meats stewed in a closely covered vessel need not be entirely covered with liquid, and a fowl, by occasionally turning, can be cooked whole in a quantity barely sufficient for gravy.
A braise rather than a boil: the bird cooks in a scant pint of liquid under a tight lid, with the toughest pieces stacked lowest where the heat is strongest. Most of the adjustment a modern cook needs is to the timings, which assume an old laying hen.
- The hinge: stack by toughnessGizzard, heart, wings and legs at the bottom, back and bony pieces next, breast and thighs on top. With only a pint of liquid the bottom of the pot is far hotter than the steam above it, so this is genuinely a cooking method and not fussiness. Do not stir the pieces once they are in.
- Timing assumes an old bird"A one-year-old fowl will stew in about an hour and a half, and each added year, an additional hour" describes a spent laying hen. A supermarket broiler is six to eight weeks old and will be tender in 35 to 45 minutes; breast pieces may be done in 25. Test the top pieces as directed and pull them out early if they are ready.
- A pint of water is enoughHalf a litre for a whole cut-up bird looks wrong until you note the closely covered kettle. The chicken steams and braises rather than poaches, and the liquid concentrates into gravy. Use a heavy pot with a lid that actually seals.
- "Stirred to a smooth paste"Equal tablespoons of butter and flour worked together cold is beurre manie, whisked into hot liquid to thicken it. It goes in twice here: once early into the pot, once into the strained broth at the end.
- Back of the stoveOn a wood range this was the coolest zone, used to hold food hot without further cooking. Cover the pot and leave it on a burner turned to the lowest setting, or in a 200F oven, while you finish the gravy.
- Season the gravy hardThe instruction to season "highly" is deliberate. The meat itself has been cooked in almost no salted liquid, so the gravy is the only seasoning the dish gets. Taste it well above the point that seems right on its own.
- SkimmingAn old fowl throws a great deal of fat. A modern chicken throws less, but the broth still separates readily if you let it stand a few minutes in the bowl before spooning the fat off the top.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb chicken will serve roughly four to six. The recipe itself specifies no accompaniment; rice, boiled potatoes or dumplings would suit the gravy.
Stewing was what you did with a hen that had stopped laying, and the arithmetic in this recipe of an extra hour per year of age is a plain statement of how poultry reached the nineteenth-century table: not as a purpose-raised young broiler but as livestock at the end of its working life. Tough, well-flavoured old birds rewarded long moist cooking, and cookbooks of the period commonly distinguished between a chicken for roasting and a fowl for the pot. The layered-kettle technique here reflects the other constraint of the era, a wood or coal range whose heat came from below and could be regulated only roughly, by damper and fire, so the cook managed temperature by choosing where in the pot, and where on the stovetop, to put things. Commercial broiler production in the twentieth century collapsed the age range almost entirely, which is why this recipe's careful timetable now reads as a relic.