To Roast a Fowl with Chestnuts

The fowl (it was a chicken) eaten the quickest of all the dishes I prepared, save the Orange Pudding.

To roast a fowl with chesnuts.

First take some chesnuts, roast them very carefully (make sure you make crosses in the skin that go through the skin, some of mine exploded in the oven and all over the kitchen) so as not to burn them, take off the skin,and peel them, take about a dozen of them cut small, and bruise them in a mortar; parboil the liver of the fowl, bruise it, cut about a quarter of a pound of ham or bacon, and pound it;then mix them all together, with a good deal of parsley chopped small, a little sweet herbs, some mace, some pepper, salt and nutmeg;mix these together and put into your fowl, and roast it.  The best way of doing it is to tie the neck, and hang it up by the legs to roast with a string, and baste it with butter.  For sauce take the rest of the chesnuts peeled and skinned, put them into some good gravy, with a little white wine, and thicken it with a piece of butter rolled in flour:then take up your fowl, lay it in the dish, and pour in the sauce. Garnish with lemon.

In Georgian kitchens they cooked over the open fire in a big fireplace, kitchen ranges were not invented until the end of the eighteenth century or thereabouts so when Hannah Glasse wrote this book she was speaking from her experience of cooking in the only way she knew how which was over the roaring open fire. There were ovens built into the side of the fireplace, for bread and so on, but most of the dishes in her book are cooked over the flames - that's why the fowl had to be strung up by it;s feet ( so the stuffing didn't fall out), something I couldn't really recreate so I put it in the oven.  I followed her recipe exactly even down to the roasting of the chestnuts and bruising things in the mortar ( that was the fun part).
When the chicken had done in the oven, I made the sauce from the gravy that came from the roasting with all the butter and different flavours in it from cooking and added some sliced mushrooms and Madeira and a bit of salt and cracked pepper ( in the mortar again) with the essential mace and nutmeg. It was very good, and a good one to remember for Christmas.