Cookery and housekeeping

Truss a fowl as for boiling; put into a braising pan with flour, butter, and water, and proceed as for fricassee of fowl till three parts done. If possible, use stock instead of water. Wash and dry Patna rice enough to cover the fowl ; cut up two or three small onions, or one Portugal onion, and fry in butter with the rice for a very short time. Then add the rice and onions, and black peppercorns, to the fowl, and, if necessary, moisten with weak stock. When both chicken and rice are cooked, place the chicken on the dish, and mask it with the rice, garnish with hardboiled eggs cut in quarters, or with tomatoes. In India, raisins and more spice would be introduced into this dish. A few cardamom seeds stewed with the rice are a great improvement. Mutton and Fowl Pillau. (Indian Recipe.) Put I lb. of uncooked mutton cut in slices with four whole onions into one quart of water ; boil all this together until reduced to one-third ; take it off the fire ; mash the meat in the liquor ; strain through a linen FOWL PILLAU. 207 cloth, and set it aside. Take 8 ozs. of rice, wash it well, and dry by squeezing firmly in a cloth. Melt \ lb. of butter in a saucepan ; fry in it a handful of onions sliced lengthways. When they have become a brown colour, take them out and lay them aside. In the butter that remains fry slightly a fowl that has been previously parboiled ; take out the fowl, and in the same butter add the dry rice and fry it a little ; as the butter evaporates add the above broth to it, and boil the rice in it ; then put with it ten cloves, ten cardamoms, ten black peppercorns, and a very little mace ; add green ginger, and one dessert-spoonful of salt with the green ginger cut into thin slices. When the rice is sufficiently boiled, remove all but a little fire from underneath, and place some on the pan cover. If the rice be at all hard, add some water to it, and place the fowl in the centre to imbibe a flavour. Cover it over with the rice, and serve up garnished with hardboiled eggs cut into either halves or quarters. Fowl Pillau No. 2. Boil a fowl, adding salt, whole black pepper, onion, a little ginger, a very little mace, and some cloves and raisins. The raisins and spice to be added later with the rice. Thoroughly wash and dry some rice — enough to cover the fowl when done. Fry some very finely shred onions in butter, and put them on one side. In this butter slightly fry the rice. Add the rice thus fried to the fowl, and finish them 2o8 POULTRY. off together by simmering till rice and fowl are well done and all the liquid absorbed. Boil hard two eggs, and cut in quarters for garnishing. Place the fowl on a dish, mask it with the rice, crown the top with the finely shred onions, and place the quarters of eggs at intervals round the margin of the dish. Chicken Curry. Take two chickens, cut them into joints, fry them a light brown in 4 ozs. of butter, take them out, fry four large onions in the same butter a light brown. Add three tablespoonsful of flour, three of Yeatman's curry powder ; mix well together over the fire for five minutes, dilute wdth veal broth, boil slowly fifteen minutes, skim, and strain the chicken ; boil till tender; dish the chicken with a border of rice ; reduce the sauce to the consistency of melted butter ; serve it over the chicken.