Boiled Fowl
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Dress, clean, and truss the fowl.
Tie the fowl in a piece of cheesecloth to prevent scum from discoloring the skin.
Cook
Place the fowl in a kettle half surrounded with boiling water.
Cover the kettle and cook slowly until tender, turning occasionally.
Add salt during the last hour of cooking.
Serve
Serve with egg, oyster, or celery sauce.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Fowl
- Is the main protein, cooked slowly until tender in simmering water.
- Coarse sea salt
- Seasons the meat, added late so it flavours the bird without being lost early.
The step that matters
Keeping the water below a hard boil. Cooking slowly with the kettle covered keeps the meat tender and the skin intact. A rapid boil toughens muscle fibres and can break the skin.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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