Boiled Chicken with Celery Sauce

I never got around to making those croissants...But, never fear. Today is a new day.

However, I did want to share the modified recipe that I came up with to acheive my perception of a chicken dish from the early nineteenth century. Hope you enjoy!

Boiled Chicken with Celery Sauce

1 whole chicken, cut into pieces
4 stalks celery (original calls for "large bunch of celery")
1/2 tsp mace - or to taste
1/2 tsp nutmeg - or to taste
1 tbsp flour
2 tbsp butter
pepper and salt to taste
5 slices turkey bacon, cooked until crisp
lemon slices to garnish

Place cut up chicken pieces in a pot and cover with water. Boil continuously until done - about 45 minutes. (I actually brought the meat to a boil and then allowed it to simmer until it was nearly off the bone. I also added a little salt to the water for flavor.)
Wash and pare celery stalks into small pieces. Place in saucepan with water to cover and boil until very soft. Drain off a very little of the water and season with mace and nutmeg before returning to medium heat. In a small measuring cup, combine salt, pepper, and flour. Add some hot water from the saucepan and whisk until combined and smooth. Add this to the saucepan with the butter, and whisk until the sauce is thickened and smooth.
Place chicken pieces in a dish and pour celery sauce over them. Garnish with chipped up turkey bacon and lemon slices.

The Promise of Morning and Sally Lunn...

I've decided that morning - with its fresh start and promise - would be the perfect time to start something so daunting as to try to make homemade croissants. Yes, I am going to try to make the nearly impossible. When I hinted to my grandmother my grand ambition - a woman who maintained a school cafeteria for decades and who has catered several dinner parties for etiquette classes full of rowdy children - she mentioned that the grocery store made fine croissants. I must agree. However, that does not satisfy me. I have found that whatever I liked on a store's shelf tastes so much better when it comes out of my own oven - preservative-free with no high fructose corn syrup. So, this morning...with gritted jaw and floured hands...I am among the brave few amateur home chefs who will attempt to find the perfect hot, buttered croissant in my own small kitchen. Now...if I could just forget that five years ago I couldn't make toast without setting my robe on fire...and that I have caught two toaster ovens on fire...Ahhhh..."Take a deep breath and put past failures behind you. Today is a new day," I tell myself. Wish me luck!

Here - for anyone interested - is the recipe for Sally Lunn that started the baking frenzy. Let it inspire you this morning...

Sally Lunn

1 c milk
1/2 c vegetable shortening
4c unbleached all purpose flour, divided
1/3 c sugar
2 tsp salt
2 packages active dry yeast
3 large eggs

In a small saucepan, combine milk, shortening, and 1/4 c water. Warm over medium heat until the shortening is almost all melted - or the liquid reaches 120 degrees.
In a large bowl, blend the 1 1/3 c flour with the sugar, salt and yeast. Blend the warm liquids into the flour mixture. Beat with a mixer at medium speed for about 2 minutes. (I used a hand mixer for this. Not completely easy, but not unable to be done.) Add the remaining flour (2 2/3c) and the eggs. Mix well, but not too much. The batter will be thick, but shouldn't be really stiff. Cover and let the dough rise in a warm, draft-free spot until doubled in bulk. This should take a little over an hour, unless you use rapid rise yeast like I did. I still let it rest for about 30-45 minutes, though. Grease a 10 inch Bundt pan. Beat the dough down with a spatula or electric mixer set on low speed. Put the dough into the prepared Bundt pan, cover, and let it rise until almost doubled in bulk again. This takes about 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake 40-50 minutes until golden brown.
When it comes out of the oven, rub real butter over the top of the bread to melt it while the bread is still hot. It tastes really great with a smathering of butter and honey. Perfect company food - it's so easy to make, but tastes so good...Your guests will think you did something really complicated.
Hope you enjoy!

Sweet Sally Lunn...

OK, sorry about the late update...

But I have been on a path of self-discovery. All it took was one eighteenth century meal to get the ball rolling, and suddenly I have found my inner baker.

So...What did I cook? With a little help from the Colonial Williamsburg website which provides a list of old recipes that have been rewritten to make it easier for a twenty-first century amateur chef, I made a delicious, creamy peanut soup. I had remembered this soup from my honeymoon to Colonial Williamsburg and was a little anxious about being able to pull it off. I shouldn't have been. The recipe proved to be so easy that the only complaint that I - or my family- had was that it should have been the main course. But it wasn't.

For the main course, I decided to be more adventurous. I actually found a great website that gives a food timeline with plenty of links to old - I mean old by over two hundred years - cookbooks. I became intrigued. I pored over recipes for days until I found the first cookbook written by an American in America. Huh....What a great place to start... The recipes proved to be easier than I suspected. Nothing too complicated about boiling chicken. Of course, I found the instructions on how to choose the perfect chicken to butcher a little hard to follow. I moseyed to my local Publix and grabbed the first package of cut up whole chicken pieces that I could find. But the celery sauce that was poured over the chicken turned out to be a hit with my family. My son asked for seconds...and thirds...That is really something for a three year old who barely eats any vegetable that isn't okra. (Hey, we do live in the South...) I found the recommendation to garnish with bacon and lemon slices charming...and a nice culinary touch. Once again, I substituted pork bacon with turkey bacon because...well, pork doesn't quite fit on a kosher diet.

The rest of the meal turned a little more mid-nineteenth century as I tried my hand at creamed squash and homemade salad dressing. I found that salads were so commonplace in colonial America that the recipes given for them were a little hard to find. In fact, while I found mention of these elusive eighteenth century sides, I couldn't find a single recipe. Looks like I need to search a little harder. The "French" dressing that I finally settled on appeared in several cookbooks written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It lacked any resemblance to the French dressing on Walmart's shelves, but turned out to be very simple to make. The creamed squash...let me just say that next time, I will follow instructions a little better. I absolutely will pick my squash from my garden in the early morning. The cookbook suggested that squash picked at that time is less tough with smaller seeds. It's worth a try...And I will invest in a good collander to press the mashed squash through so that I can get rid of some of the ubiquitous seeds. Other than that, it turned out pretty well.

Of all of the things that I made, however, the bread turned out to be the crowd favorite - forcing me to reproduce several loaves over the next couple of weeks. I looked to Colonial Williamsburg once again to find the perfect recipe for a loaf of Sally Lunn, a sweet Southern treat brought here from England. Of course, there are conflicting views as to the bread's origin, but one can hardly mull those over once the sweet, light texture of the bread takes over the senses. The smell is maddening, and the taste can spoil your tastebuds forever. I have had limited success in baking bread before, but this was so easy that it boosted my baking confidence.

All it took was a couple of loaves of hot, buttered Sally Lunn to build up my baking muscles and start me off on the quest to bake. My husband has informed me that he hopes this is more than a short term fling into the baking world. I have churned out pretzels, bagels, loaves of white bread, pita bread, and even a baguette in the past couple of weeks. Not to mention rugelach cookies and meringues.

It's going to take a lot more than a few baked goods to transform me into a housewife that my ancestors' could be proud of, but I need a starting place somewhere. I've been looking for a hobby, anyway. And...as I survey my growing belly and bare feet, I realize that I just may have found the perfect one. This morning, as usual, I am barefoot, pregnant, and ...in the kitchen. Hmmm...wonder what I'll bake today?...