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Roast Chicken
(Paris.) Clean, stuff, and roast a fine fowl, larding it with bits of bacon, and basting with 1 cup of consomme. Strain the sauce, add 1 onion, some parsley, and the livers, chopped fine, a cup of bread-crumbs and the juice of an orange. Boil, strain again, and serve with a salad of watercress. CHICKEN (as cooked in Monte Carlo.).
Melt 2 tablespoonfuls of butter in an earthen dish or casserole with 1 carrot, 3 onions, sliced, 2 bayleaves, salt, pepper, and some thyme. Add a young fat fowl, cut into joints, and let it get brown. Then add 1 pint of consomme and cover, air tight; cook 3/4 of an hour; it must simmer all that time. If the fowl is old, it will take longer to cook it. Add 2 tablespoonfuls of sherry, a dozen potato balls fried in butter, a dozen button mushrooms, and some chopped parsley. Let it cook 10 minutes more, and serve in the same dish, or the charm of it will be lost.
FRIED CHICKEN (as cooked in Vienna.).
Clean and cut up a fat chicken. Cover it for 3 hours with a mixture of lemon juice and olive oil, parsley, a bayleaf, and seasoning. Drain, dip each piece in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry brown. Mix 1 cup of white stock with 1 cup of rich milk, the yolk of an egg, and 10 small mushrooms. Season and cook carefully and pour around the chicken, first adding a little chopped parsley and the juice of a lemon to the sauce.
CHICKEN (as cooked in Spain and Portugal.).
Clean and cut up a fat fowl, fry it in 2 ounces of butter with 1 ounce of ham and an onion, chopped fine. Add 1 quart of consomme, 1 pint of stewed tomatoes, 2 dozen bits of ochra, 1 cup of rice, and 1 green pepper, free from seeds and sliced. Season and cook, closely covered, for 1 1/2 hours. CHICKEN, STEWED (as cooked in Hungary.).
Clean and truss a fat fowl; fill it with bread-crumbs, onion, herbs, and yolk of an egg. Tie the breast with slices of lemon and salt pork, then wrap in oiled paper. Add 1 onion, 1 clove, and some parsley and 1 cup of white stock, or enough to cover it. Cook, covered, 1 hour. Strain the sauce, add 1 cup of hot cream, a pinch of paprika, some butter, the yolk of an egg, and some parsley. Pour around the chicken and serve with rice. FRIED CHICKEN (as cooked in Florence.).
Cut up a fat fowl and parboil it in 1 pint of white stock. Drain it, reduce the stock, and add the yolks of 2 eggs and the juice of a lemon, and strain it. Dip the chicken in the sauce, then in crumbs and grated cheese, and fry brown. Serve the rest of the sauce in a bowl.
Six variations on one bird, collected as souvenirs of European kitchens and written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the basics. The gaps are mostly temperatures, vessel types and a few names that have drifted.
- Consommé and white stockBoth mean clear, unthickened stock — consommé being the richer, clarified beef or veal version, white stock a pale poultry or veal one. Good low-sodium chicken stock stands in for either; the seasoning in these dishes assumes an unsalted or lightly salted base.
- "Casserole" means the potIn 1902 an earthen dish or casserole is a lidded earthenware or enamelled braising pot, not a baked assembly. A Dutch oven is the direct equivalent, and the Monte Carlo instruction to serve in the same dish is the point of using one.
- Roasting the first birdNo oven temperature is given. A larded, stuffed 4–5 lb bird roasts well at 400F for the first 20 minutes and 350F thereafter, about 1½ hours total; the thigh should read 165F. Basting with a cup of consommé over that time gives you the pan liquid the sauce depends on.
- LardingThreading strips of bacon or salt pork through the breast with a larding needle compensates for the lean birds of the period. Barding — tying thin bacon or fatback over the breast — achieves the same protection with modern equipment and comes off for the last 15 minutes to brown the skin.
- OchraOkra. Two dozen bits means roughly half a cup of half-inch slices. Added at the start of a 1½-hour covered stew it will collapse entirely; adding it in the last 20 minutes keeps some texture, and the whole dish is closer to a rice pilau than to a soup.
- "Cover, air tight"A heavy lid, or a lid sealed with a strip of flour-and-water paste, to keep the pint of consommé from reducing away. A tight modern lid does the job. Three-quarters of an hour is right for a jointed young bird; a mature stewing hen wants two hours or more.
- The egg-yolk saucesThe Viennese, Hungarian and Florentine sauces are all thickened with yolk and will curdle if boiled. Temper the yolk with a ladle of the hot liquid, return it off the heat, and hold the sauce below a simmer — under 180F — until it coats a spoon.
- The Vienna marinadeThree hours in lemon juice and oil should happen in the refrigerator, not on the counter. The acid firms the surface of the meat, so drain and pat dry before the egg-and-crumb coating or it will not adhere.
- Potato balls and button mushroomsPotato balls are scooped with a melon baller from raw potato and fried in butter until golden. Button mushrooms here means small whole caps, left whole and added at the end so they do not shed water into the sauce.
- YieldEach version feeds four to six from a single 4–5 lb bird. The Spanish and Portuguese one, with a cup of rice, stretches to six comfortably.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea is generally attributed to Adelaide Keen and appeared in 1902, part of a small wave of turn-of-the-century books that packaged foreign recipes as travel souvenirs for American households. The format here — one ingredient, six cities — is the whole conceit of the book, and it says more about the Grand Tour than about any national cuisine: Paris supplies consommé and orange juice, Monte Carlo a casserole with sherry and potato balls, Vienna a breaded and fried bird close to Wiener Backhendl, Spain and Portugal a rice-and-tomato dish whose okra and green pepper read more like American Creole cooking than like anything Iberian. The Hungarian entry, wrapped in oiled paper and finished with cream and paprika, catches paprika at a point when it was becoming the signature of Hungarian cooking in foreign eyes. What unites them is the assumption of a fat young fowl and a pot of stock always on hand — the two things a well-run kitchen of the period took for granted and a modern one has to plan for.