This section is from the book "More Pot-Pourri From A Surrey Garden", by C. W. Earle. Also available from Amazon: More pot-pourri from a Surrey garden.
Abandon the boiled fowl fashion; order a pair of fowls to be sent without being trussed, and let the heads and necks be sent with them. Cut up one of the fowls into pieces - the leg and thigh into two pieces, the back into three pieces, and the breast into two pieces, which with the merry-thought will be fourteen pieces.
'Take a Spanish onion, cut it up small, put it into a stewpan with two ounces of butter and a little pepper and salt; let it stew gently for about an hour until it is in a complete pulp. Half an hour before you want it put in the fourteen pieces of chicken, let them stew half an hour, and when done put into your silver dish a tea-spoonful of Spanish or French garlic vinegar, or, if that is not liked, the squeeze of half a lemon, and you will never again want to taste insipid boiled fowl. Mind, it requires no water; the fowl will be done in its own gravy.
'Cut the other fowl in the same way, viz. fourteen pieces. Let the heads and necks be picked and scalded, stew them in half a pint of water, and when all the goodness is extracted strain off the liquor, put it into a stewpan with a pint of button mushrooms, a little pepper and salt, and put in the fourteen pieces of fowl, stew them until done (about half an hour), thicken with a little arrowroot. When you dish them up, put into your silver dish a tablespoonful of mushroom catchup. These two fowls will be a variety, will require only the effort of serving, will be enough for eight or ten persons, and each convive will want to taste each dish.
'Pigeons when in season cooked in the same manner are equally good, and make a change - such a change that those who taste it never forget. Grouse and partridges treated the same way are better than roasted.
'A young turkey poult dressed in the same way is a very inviting dish.'
Towards the middle of October I buy two or three young turkeys in Suffolk, and feed them here till a fortnight before Christmas. They must be starved twenty-four hours before killing, and require to hang about a fortnight. They should not be plucked or cleaned out till they are going to be cooked.
 
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