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Chicken Fillets Braised
Place half-dozen pieces of salt pork on the bottom of braising pan. On this put two slices of onion; dredge the fillets well with salt, pepper and flour; put pork and onion on fire, cover pan and cook slowly twenty-five minutes, then add a pint of good stock, bones of one chicken, cover pan and cook moderately one hour. Baste often with the gravy; if necessary for more gravy add little more stock. Remove the fillets from fire and drain until quite dry. Cover with soft butter and dredge well with flour. Broil until a pretty brown and serve with Maitre d'hotel butter.
A two-stage French treatment: the breast fillets are sweated and braised over salt pork, then finished under fire with butter. The wording assumes a cook who already knows a braising pan, so a few gaps need filling.
- What a fillet is hereThe fillet is the boneless breast muscle taken off one side of the bird, usually with the little tenderloin attached. Two fillets per chicken, so the "bones of one chicken" line suggests the carcass is going back into the pot for body.
- The missing instructionThe recipe never says to put the fillets in the pan, but they go on top of the pork and onion for the first twenty-five minutes of covered, slow cooking. That stage is a sweat, not a browning: low heat, lid on, no colour.
- Braising panAny heavy pan with a tight lid and a low profile. A wide Dutch oven or a deep sauté pan works. Modern equivalent heat is a bare simmer on the stovetop, or a 300F oven if you prefer the steadier heat.
- The hour is too longBoneless breast is cooked through at 160-165F internal, which takes fifteen to twenty minutes of gentle braising, not sixty. The long time here reflects tougher, older birds; a supermarket chicken held an hour in stock will be dry and stringy no matter how often you baste. Braise to temperature, then let the liquid and bones keep reducing on their own.
- A pint of stockTwo cups. It should come partway up the fillets, not cover them, and it wants to be a real gelatinous chicken stock rather than a thin broth, since it becomes the basting liquid and the gravy.
- SaltSalt pork, salted flour dredge, and a reducing stock all stack. Use unsalted or lightly salted stock and go easy on the initial seasoning, or the finished gravy will be inedible.
- Draining and the second dredgeThe fillets must be genuinely dry before the butter and flour go on, or the coating slides off and steams instead of browning. Pat them well and let them sit a few minutes.
- BroilHighest setting, rack close to the element, two to three minutes a side. This is colour only, since the meat is already cooked. Watch it: butter and flour go from brown to black quickly.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced onto the hot meat. About a quarter cup of butter to a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of juice.
- YieldThe recipe does not state how many fillets or how many it serves; the reference to the bones of one chicken is the only clue to scale.
Braising a fillet and then finishing it over direct heat is straight out of the French professional repertoire that American hotel and club cooking absorbed through the second half of the nineteenth century, and household books like this one carried it into domestic kitchens in simplified form. The salt pork on the bottom of the pan is doing what a bard of fat or a layer of pork rind does in a classical braise, protecting the meat from the pan and enriching the liquid, while the chicken bones supply the gelatin that turns the stock into a glossy gravy. Maitre d'hotel butter was the default finish for broiled meat and fish for decades, familiar enough that this book does not bother to explain it. The recipe's silences are the real period marker: it assumes a reader who knows what to do with a braising pan and needs only the sequence.