Chicken Fricassee - American Recipe

Chicken Fricassee

🌍 American, American Home Cooking Difficulty: ●●○○○

🍳 Equipment: Meat-knife, Saucepan, Large spoon, 2 bowls

Traditional chicken fricassee — straightforward 1920s home cooking.

Ingredients

• Small chicken
• 4 tablespoons flour
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1½ teaspoons salt
• Pepper
• 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
• ½ cup cream or milk

Method

1. With — a meat-knife separate the legs and wings of the chicken from the body, cut the body in two, length-wise along the back-bone, and cut each half of the body into two parts.
2. Wash — the pieces of chicken and dry them.
3. Put — the chicken in a saucepan and barely cover it with boiling water.
4. Set — the saucepan over the fire, cover it, reduce the heat so that the water will simmer, and cook for forty minutes, removing the scum as it rises to the surface of the water.
5. Remove — the pieces of chicken from the saucepan to a bowl, and pour the liquid from the saucepan into another bowl.
6. Melt — the butter in the saucepan, add the flour, salt, and pepper, and mix thoroughly until no lumps remain.
7. Measure — out 3 cups of the hot liquid in which the chicken has cooked, and add it slowly to the butter and flour in the saucepan, stirring constantly until it thickens and boils.
8. Add — the cream or milk and the parsley to this gravy, and put the pieces of chicken into it.
9. Reduce — the heat, cover the saucepan, and simmer for half an hour.

Tags: chicken, pepper, milk, cream, butter, flour · Source: The Plain Sailing Cook Book (1922)

Notes

Baking-Powder Biscuit (page 134) may be split in two and arranged around the chicken on the serving platter, and the gravy poured over all. Or, the uncooked biscuit dough may be put by the tablespoonful into the saucepan with the chicken for the last half-hour of cooking, and then served on the same platter.

Cross-References

• See (page 134)