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Stewed Chicken
(Germany.) Clean and cut up a fowl, cook it gently in 1 1/2 pints of white broth until tender. Take out the chicken, skim and strain and reduce the sauce by rapid boiling, add 1 ounce of chopped almonds, pounded, in 1/2 pint of milk, seasoned with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, pour over the chicken. Serve with a border of boiled rice.
CREAM OF CHICKEN WITH POACHED EGGS. (An old convent recipe and used still in provincial France as a Lenten breakfast dish.) Mince and pound the best part of a cooked fowl, add salt and pepper, and enough milk or white stock to make a paste when pressed through a sieve. Cook and stir over the fire, pour it on a dish and, arrange 6 poached eggs, with a border of parsley, on top.
Two related dishes are run together here, both of them pale, mild, almond-and-milk cookery of a kind that has gone out of fashion. Neither is difficult, but the sauce needs attention because there is no flour in it.
- What a fowl isA "fowl" meant an older laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a modern broiler, and it wanted an hour or two of gentle simmering. A 4-5 lb chicken will be tender in 45-60 minutes at a bare simmer; check the thigh joint rather than trusting the clock.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock made from veal or chicken bones with aromatics and no colour from roasting. Any light chicken stock does, ideally unsalted since the sauce is later reduced hard and will concentrate whatever salt is in it.
- Measures1 1/2 pints is 3 cups, 1/2 pint is 1 cup, and 1 ounce of almonds is a scant 1/4 cup once ground. British Imperial pints (20 fl oz) would make these figures a quarter larger; either works, as the sauce is reduced by eye.
- The almonds are the thickeningNo roux here -- the body comes from reducing the broth, with the almonds adding richness rather than real thickening. Blanch and skin them, grind them fine — a spice grinder replaces the mortar — and steep them in the milk before it goes into the reduced broth. Coarse almonds will simply sink.
- Don't boil after the milk goes inThe broth is reduced by rapid boiling before the milk and almonds are added; once they are in, hard boiling can curdle it and roughen the texture. Bring it back to a bare tremble only.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a light hand — a pinch across the whole sauce. Pre-ground nutmeg in a mild white sauce reads dusty.
- The cream of chicken"Cook and stir over the fire" means heat the sieved paste gently until it thickens; it scorches easily, so use a heavy pan and low heat. The recipe still expects it to pour onto the dish, so stop short of a stiff paste.
- YieldNeither recipe states a yield; a fowl with rice will stretch to about 4, and the second dish, made from the best part of a cooked bird and the 6 poached eggs the recipe calls for, suits 6 as a light course.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century American books that collected "national" dishes from European travel, which is why this page carries a bracketed country like a label on a museum case. The first recipe resembles German and Austrian Hühnerfrikassee — poached fowl in a pale sauce, unbrowned from start to finish, with the whiteness of the dish treated as a virtue in itself — though the German version is conventionally bound with a blond roux. Almonds ground into milk to thicken and enrich a sauce is a much older European technique than flour thickening, common in medieval and early modern cookery and surviving longest in festival and fast-day dishes, since almond milk stood in for dairy when dairy was forbidden. That logic sits behind the second recipe too: the author's note that it served as a Lenten breakfast in provincial France is the kind of claim these books repeat traditionally rather than document, but eggs and a milk-bound purée were exactly the sort of food permitted when meat was not.