For boiled fowls, you may make a nice stuffing of fresh oysters, cut in small pieces, but not minced. Omit the gristle. Mix them with an equal portion of hard-boiled eggs chopped, but not minced fine. Add plenty of grated bread-crumbs, and season with powdered mace. Mix in, also, some bits of fresh butter. Where onions are liked, you may substitute for the oysters some onions boiled and minced.
Fowls boil very nicely in a bain marie, or double kettle, with the water outside. They require a longer time, but are excellent when done. To quicken the boiling of a double kettle, put a handful of salt in the outside water.
Small chickens, of course, require a shorter time to cook.
PULLED FOWL.—
This is a side dish for company. Select a fine tender fowl, young, fat, full-grown, and of a large kind. When quite done take it out of the pot, cover it, and set it away till wanted. Then, with a fork, pull off in flakes all the flesh, (first removing the skin,) and with a chopper break all the bones, and put them into a stew-pan, adding two calves' feet split, and the hock of a cold ham, a small bunch of parsley and sweet marjoram, and a quart of water. Let it boil gently till reduced to a pint. Then take it out. Have ready, in another stew-pan, the bits of pulled fowl. Strain the liquor from the bones, &c., over the fowl, and add a piece of fresh butter, (the size of a small egg,) rolled in flour, and a tea-spoonful of powdered mace and nutmeg, mixed. Mix the whole together, and let the pulled fowl stew in gravy for ten minutes. Serve it hot.
A turkey may be cooked in this manner, and will make a fine dish. For a turkey allow four calves' feet.
FRIED CHICKENS.—
Cut up a pair of nice young fowls, flatten and quarter them, and season them with cayenne and powdered mace, rubbing it in well. Put some lard into a heated frying pan over the fire, or if you have plenty of nice fresh butter use that in preference. When the lard or butter boils, and has been skimmed, put in the pieces of chicken, and fry them brown on one side. Then turn them, and sprinkle them thickly all over with chopped parsley, or sweet marjoram, and fry them brown on the other side. You may fry with them a few thin slices of cold ham. Before serving them up drain off the lard you have used for frying.