II.
948. INGREDIENTS.—The remains of cold roast fowl, vinegar, salt and cayenne to taste, 4 minced shalots, yolk of egg; to every teacupful of bread crumbs allow 1 blade of pounded mace, 5 teaspoonful of minced lemon-peel, 1 saltspoonful of salt, a few grains of cayenne.
Mode.—Steep the pieces of fowl as in the preceding recipe, then dip them into the yolk of an egg or clarified butter; sprinkle over bread crumbs with which have been mixed salt, mace, cayenne, and lemon-peel in the above proportion. Fry a light brown, and serve with or without gravy, as may be preferred.
Time.—10 minutes to fry the fowl.
Average cost, exclusive of the cold fowl, 6d.
Seasonable at any time.
VARIOUS MODES OF FATTENING FOWLS.—It would, I think, be a difficult matter to find, among the entire fraternity of fowl-keepers, a dozen whose mode of fattening "stock" is the same. Some say that the grand f secret is to give them abundance of saccharine food; others say nothing beats heavy corn steeped in milk; while another breeder, celebrated in his day, and the recipient of a gold medal from a learned society, says, "The best method is as follows:-The chickens are to be taken from the hen the night after they are hatched, and fed with eggs hard-boiled, chopped, and mixed with crumbs of bread, as larks and other small birds are fed, for the first fortnight; after which give them oatmeal and treacle mixed so as to crumble, of which the chickens are very fond, and thrive so fast that, at the end of two months, they will be as large as full-grown fowls." Others there are who insist that nothing beats oleaginous diet, and cram their birds with ground oats and suet. But, whatever the course of diet favoured, on one point they seem agreed; and that is, that, while fattening, the fowls should be kept in the dark. Supposing the reader to be a dealer—a breeder of gross chicken meat for the market (against which supposition the chances are 10,000 to 1), and beset with as few scruples as generally trouble the huckster, the advice is valuable. "Laugh and grow fat" is a good maxim enough; but "Sleep and grow fat" is, as is well known to folks of porcine attributes, a better. The poor birds, immured in their dark dungeons, ignorant that there is life and sunshine abroad, tuck their heads under their wings and make a long night of it; while their digestive organs, having no harder work than to pile up fat, have an easy time enough. But, unless we are mistaken, he who breeds poultry for his own eating, bargains for a more substantial reward than the questionable pleasure of burying his carving-knife in chicken grease. Tender, delicate, and nutritious flesh is the great aim; and these qualities, I can affirm without fear of contradiction, were never attained by a dungeon-fatted chicken: perpetual gloom and darkness is as incompatible with chicken life as it is with human. If you wish to be convinced of the absurdity of endeavouring to thwart nature's laws, plant a tuft of grass, or a cabbage-plant, in the darkest corner of your coal-cellar. The plant or the tuft may increase in length and breadth, but its colour will be as wan and pale, almost, as would be your own face under the circumstances.