Sweet chicken.

Two posts with a similar idea doth not a series make - but perhaps three doth? I just had to try to push this week’s accidental theme a bit further. A search for ‘Sweet Chicken’ led me to a new resource – always a wonderful moment.

Cookery made Easy: being a complete system of Domestic Management, uniting Elegance with Economy by Michael Willis (‘many years cook at the Thatched-House Tavern’) was first published in London in the 1820’s. It is quite a ‘retro’ effort for the time, although this does not appear to be intentional. Many of the recipes seem to be firmly grounded in the previous century, many with almost medieval overtones.

Now, Uniting Elegance with Economy is something that I aspire to daily, but pray, tell me what is Easy about the following Cookery recipe?



Sweet Chicken Pie
Break the bones of four chickens, cut them into small pieces and season them highly with mace cinnamon,, and salt four yolks of eggs boiled hard, and quartered, and five artichoke bottoms, eight ounces of sun raisins stoned, eight ounces each of preserved citron lemon, eringo roots, and marrow, four slices of rinded lemon, eight ounces of currants, fifty balls of forcemeat made as for umble pie: put in all, one with the other, butter the bottom of the pie, put in a pound of fresh butter on the top-lid, and bake it. Boil a pint of white wine, sweetening it to your taste, and thicken it with the yolks of two eggs; put it to the pie when very hot and serve it up.
Cookery made easy: being a complete system of domestic management, ... by Michael Willis, 1831.

Quotation for the Day.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.
Samuel Johnson.