Wash thoroughly and wipe dry within and without. Stuff the hollow in the body, also the craw, with a force-meat, but do not pack it in. It will ooze out or distend the fowl into a clumsy shape, or become so clammy as to be unfit to eat. Sew up the body and draw the skin covering the craw up to the neck, fastening it there with a cotton cord wound tightly about the neck-bone. Bind the legs and the wings close to the body with tape or cotton cord. Unless the fowl is very fat, lay a few slices of fat bacon or pork in the pan and the chicken upon them. Pour a scant cupful of boiling water over it; put on the lid of the roaster and cook quite fast for fifteen minutes, afterward more moderately, fifteen minutes to the pound. Baste every half hour if you use the covered roaster, every ten minutes if you cook it in an open dripping-pan. Each time pour at least ten large spoonfuls of gravy over the fowl. A quarter of an hour before you dish it wash it all over with butter, pepper and salt it well, and dredge it with flour. Take off the cover of the roaster and brown. Dish and keep warm while you make the gravy.

Chop the giblets fine, rejecting the cartilage; stir a spoonful of browned flour, wet with cold water, into the baking-pan gravy, boil up, season to taste, add the giblets, and pour into a boat.

For the stuffing use a cupful of fine bread-crumbs (cracker-dust will not do) moistened with a tablespoonful of butter and seasoned with pepper, salt, and parsley. Do not flavor it with thyme or sage or onion. These are disagreeable to many tastes and help to give the "dressing" of fowls the reputation of unwholesomeness. Moreover, they mar the flavor of the delicate meat.

The English truss a roasting chicken with the liver under one wing, and esteem this "liver-wing " a choice morsel in carving and distributing the bird.