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Annastich
(A German-Jewish recipe.) Wash 1 pound of rice, add 1 quart of good white broth, and cook it, stirring often, for 1/2 hour. Add some parsley and thyme and a chicken, stuffed and tied as for roasting, and, covering closely, cook slowly until the fowl is tender. Take out the chicken, strain the broth, add the yolk of an egg, the juice of a lemon, and 1/2 a teaspoonful of saffron,--which may be omitted,--and pour over.
A one-pot poached chicken on saffron rice, thickened at the end with egg and lemon. The original's sequence needs rearranging, and one quantity is far out of modern range.
- Cook the bird first, not the riceRice given a full half hour in liquid before the chicken even goes in will be porridge by the time a whole fowl is tender. Poach the chicken in the broth until done, then lift it out and cook the rice in that broth for 18-20 minutes.
- Liquid is shortLiquid is short for a sauce -- A pound of rice (about 2 1/3 cups) to a quart of broth is roughly the absorption ratio and leaves little over, though the recipe assumes enough liquid left to strain and pour. Allow about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of broth per cup of rice here, adding more hot stock as it is absorbed, since a covered pot with a chicken in it also gives off juices.
- "Good white broth"A pale, unbrowned stock from veal or poultry bones and aromatics, made without tomato or roasted bones. A light unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; salt at the end, since the liquid reduces considerably.
- SaffronHalf a teaspoonful of threads is a generous amount for this quantity and can push the sauce towards bitterness. A good pinch, crushed and steeped in a spoonful of hot broth, gives the colour and perfume wanted; the recipe itself says it may be omitted.
- The egg and lemon will curdle if rushedThis is a version of the Mediterranean egg-lemon liaison. Beat the yolk with the lemon juice, whisk in a ladle of hot strained broth slowly to temper it, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat. It must not boil after the egg goes in.
- Stuffing is left to youNo forcemeat is specified. Anything moist works badly in a poached bird; a dry bread or matzo-meal stuffing bound with schmaltz, onion and herbs suits both the dish and the kosher context. Stuffing inside a poached chicken heats slowly, so check it reaches 165F at the centre along with the thigh.
- Chicken size and timingA 4 to 5 lb bird, closely covered and barely simmering, wants roughly 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Hold the pot at a lazy bubble; a hard boil toughens the breast and clouds the broth you are about to serve.
- YieldA pound of rice and a whole fowl feeds six to eight. Carve the chicken, bed it on the saffron rice, and pour the finished sauce over.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) collected dishes from immigrant and foreign kitchens for American cooks, and its "German-Jewish" entries reflect the large Central European Jewish population then established in the United States. The dish itself is a rice-and-fowl dish of a type found widely across the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds, distinguished here by two markers of the older Jewish kitchen: saffron, long a prestige spice at festive tables, and a sauce enriched with egg yolk and lemon rather than butter or cream, which keeps a meat dish within the dietary laws. The name is not standard German, and I have not been able to trace this spelling outside Keen's book; period cookbooks sometimes rendered dialect or Yiddish dish-names phonetically, and the word may be one such transcription, though that is a guess rather than a documented case.