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Chicken, A La Lyonnaise
Cut up and fry in butter, as directed for the chickens with oysters; when they are done pour off all the grease, add some Lyonnaise sauce, simmer the whole together on the fire for ten minutes, and serve.
A two-line finishing recipe that assumes you already have two things the book supplies elsewhere: sautéed chicken pieces and a pot of Lyonnaise sauce. Build the sauce first and the rest takes twenty minutes.
- The missing sauceLyonnaise sauce is a brown onion sauce: onions sliced thin and cooked slowly in butter until deep gold, deglazed with dry white wine and a splash of white wine vinegar, reduced almost dry, then loosened with brown stock or demi-glace and simmered until it coats a spoon. The onions must be cooked patiently to sweetness before any liquid goes in; rushed onions make the sauce sharp and thin, and no amount of simmering later fixes it.
- "As directed for the chickens with oysters"That cross-reference means a sauté, not deep frying: joint the bird into eight or ten pieces, season, and cook in butter in a wide pan over medium heat, skin side first, until browned and cooked through. Butter alone will darken; a spoonful of neutral oil with it keeps the fond from burning before the thighs are done.
- Bird sizeA period "chicken" for this treatment would have been a young and, by modern standards, fairly small bird. A modern 3½ to 4 lb chicken works, but the breast pieces should come out of the pan several minutes before the legs and go back in at the sauce stage.
- Pour off all the greaseThis is the hinge. A frying pan's worth of butter and rendered chicken fat is far more than a wine-and-stock sauce can carry; leave it in and you get a greasy film rather than a glaze. Tip the fat out but keep the browned residue in the pan, and let the sauce lift it as it comes to a simmer.
- The ten minutesThat final simmer is for marrying and reducing, not for cooking the chicken, which should already be done. Cook to 165F/74C at the thickest part of the thigh during the sauté; ten minutes in barely bubbling sauce will not rescue an underdone leg and will dry out a breast that was already cooked.
- Heat levelKeep the pan at a bare simmer once the sauce is in. A hard boil breaks the reduction and drives off the wine and vinegar aromatics that give the sauce its point.
- Yield and servingOne chicken serves three to four. Plain boiled or steamed potatoes suit it, and a little chopped parsley over the top is a common finish for dishes carrying the Lyonnaise tag.
À la lyonnaise is French kitchen shorthand for onions, Lyon and its surrounding country having long been associated with onion cookery — the same tag gives us lyonnaise potatoes. The sauce itself is a classic small brown sauce of the nineteenth-century repertoire, built on the espagnole-and-demi-glace system generally traced to Carême and often said to have been tidied later by Escoffier, which is why a book like this can name it in three words and expect the cook to know. Cookbooks of the period were often thick with such abbreviations: sauces and basic preparations tended to live in their own chapters, and the meat and poultry entries could be little more than instructions for combining them. The result reads as terse today, but it reflects a kitchen where a cook worked through a book as a system rather than a page at a time.