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Chicken A La Reine
Prepare a nice pair of chickens as for roasting. Dredge well with salt, pepper and flour. Cut three or four slices of pork and put half in the bottom of stewpan; also two slices of carrot, one large onion cut fine. Stir the whole over the fire until it begins to color, and then put in the chickens, and lay rest of the pork over them. Put the saucepan in a hot oven for about twenty minutes, add white stock to half cover chickens, a bunch of sweet herbs; dredge well with flour. Cover pan and return to the oven. Baste every few minutes and cook one hour, then turn over the chickens. Cook in all about two hours, and serve with Hollandaise sauce.
A braise dressed up as a roast: the birds are browned in salt pork fat, then cooked half-submerged in stock under a lid. The two-hour timing belongs to older, tougher fowl and is the main thing to adjust.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe's "hot oven" for the initial twenty-minute browning is usually read as roughly 425-450F. The recipe itself never says to lower the heat, but once the stock is in and the pan covered, a moderate oven of about 325-350F suits the braise.
- TimingTwo hours suited a mature bird. Two modern 3 1/2 to 4 lb chickens will be done in about 1 1/4 hours of covered cooking; go by 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, not the clock, or the breasts will be dry and stringy.
- The porkAlmost certainly salt pork or fat back, cut about 1/4 inch thick, used as the cooking fat and as a barding layer over the breasts. Unsmoked streaky bacon is the closest substitute; if it is heavily cured, be sparing with the added salt.
- White stockA pale, unroasted chicken or veal stock. Roasted brown stock will work but gives a darker, heavier gravy than the dish is aiming for, and will sit oddly under the pale sauce.
- Sweet herbsA tied bundle of parsley, thyme and a bay leaf. Tie it so it can be lifted out before the liquid is finished or served.
- The flour dredgingFlour goes on twice, on the birds and again after the stock. It thickens the braising liquid, so stir the pan juices when you baste and scrape the bottom; unstirred flour on a pan base in a hot oven scorches and turns the gravy bitter.
- Basting under a lid"Baste every few minutes" with the pan covered means a good deal of oven-door opening. Basting three or four times over the hour is enough; the lid and the pork are doing most of the work.
- The HollandaiseMake it after the chickens come out and are resting, and hold it barely warm. It will break if kept over direct heat, and it cannot be reheated once the birds are carved.
- YieldTwo chickens serve six to eight. Strain and skim the braising liquid and send it to table separately from the Hollandaise rather than pooling the two.
The name is straightforwardly French restaurant vocabulary of a period when American household books borrowed grand-sounding titles wholesale: a la reine, "in the queen's style," was attached to all sorts of dishes and generally signalled something pale, delicate and finished with a rich white or egg-based sauce rather than a brown gravy. That is what governs the choices here, the white stock and the Hollandaise instead of pan drippings thickened dark. The method itself, salt pork in the bottom of the pan, root vegetables, a bundle of herbs and a covered oven braise, is the old pot-roast treatment for fowl, often explained by the fact that the birds available to a household cook were laying hens well past their best and needed moist heat and time. The two-hour instruction is the clearest fossil in the recipe: it tells you what kind of chicken the writer expected to buy.