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Chicken A La Tartare
Split the chicken in the back, wash and wipe well with a cloth; season with salt and pepper; rub the chicken well with softened butter and roll on both sides in fine bread crumbs. Put in a baking pan inside down, and cook in a hot oven twenty-five minutes-being careful that it does not burn.
Serve with Tartare sauce.
This is spatchcocked chicken, crumbed and roasted hot — the technique is sound, but the timing assumes a bird half the size of what you will buy today.
- "Split in the back"Cut through the backbone and open the bird out flat, pressing down to break the breastbone; many cooks now remove the backbone entirely with shears. Flattening is the point: it lets the thighs and breast finish at close to the same moment.
- Hot ovenThe text gives no temperature; for this period a hot oven is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F. A cooler oven is less likely to crisp the crumb coating.
- Twenty-five minutes is for a small birdBroilers of this period were commonly in the range of 1.5 to 2.5 lb. A modern 3.5-4 lb chicken, spatchcocked, will need roughly 40-50 minutes at 425F. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone, rather than by the clock.
- "Inside down"Cut side down, skin up — the ribs act as a rack and the crumbed skin gets direct oven heat. Do not turn it.
- Keeping the crumbs from burningButter and fine crumbs at 450F scorch before the meat is done. Use coarser fresh crumbs, and tent loosely with foil once the coating is a good brown.
- Softened, not melted, butterSoftened butter holds the crumbs in place; melted butter runs off and takes the coating with it. Press the crumbs on firmly with the flat of your hand.
- Tartare sauceThe period version is a stiff, hand-made mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, parsley and a little onion or shallot. Any good jarred tartare works, though it will be looser and sweeter than intended.
- YieldOne bird serves two generously, or four as part of a larger meal. Rest it 10 minutes before carving.
"À la tartare" in nineteenth-century cookery meant grilled or broiled meat, crumbed and served with the cold caper-and-pickle mayonnaise that took its name from the same supposed Tartar association — a French kitchen convention rather than anything traceable to Central Asia. The dish appears here in a form suited to the American household of the period: chickens were sold small and young, spring broilers were a seasonal luxury, and splitting and crumbing was one way to cook one quickly without a grill over coals. Recipes of this vintage rarely give weights for poultry or internal temperatures for anything, which is why the twenty-five minutes reads so short today; the birds themselves are generally reckoned to have grown considerably in size since the book was written.