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Chicken Fillets Larded and Breaded
Lard the fillets and have three strips of pork for each one; season with salt and pepper to the taste; dip in beaten egg and roll in cracker or bread crumbs. Fry in boiling fat. Serve with tartare sauce.
A terse professional-style note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you know how to lard, how to bread, and how hot the fat should be. Here is what it leaves unsaid.
- What a fillet isIn poultry cookery of this period the fillet is the boneless breast half, sometimes with the small inner tenderloin (the filet mignon of the bird) attached. A modern boneless, skinless breast is the direct equivalent; halve thick ones horizontally or pound them to an even half inch so they cook through before the crumbs darken.
- Larding, and whether to botherLarding means threading strips of firm fatback or salt pork through the surface of lean meat with a larding needle, so it bastes itself. Three strips per fillet is the instruction. A larding needle is the one piece of equipment you may not own; the practical substitute is to wrap each fillet in a thin sheet of fatback or two rashers of unsmoked streaky bacon before breading. Larding matters less with today's plump, moist broiler breasts than it did with the leaner birds of the period.
- The porkUse fatback or unsmoked salt pork, not bacon, if you want the original flavour. Salt pork should be blanched briefly in water and dried before use, or the finished fillet will be too salty, and season the chicken itself lightly for the same reason.
- "Boiling fat"Fat at frying heat is not actually boiling; the phrase is period shorthand for fat hot enough to bubble vigorously around whatever is dropped in. The book gives no figure; in modern terms somewhere in the region of 350-375F, or hot enough to brown a cube of bread in under a minute. Cooler than that and the crumb coat soaks; much hotter and the coating colours before the centre is done.
- Breading that stays onThe original gives egg and crumbs only. Dredging in flour first, then egg, then crumbs, gives a coat that survives the fryer. Let the breaded fillets rest ten to fifteen minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- DonenessFour to six minutes total for a half-inch fillet, turning once. Chicken breast is done at 165F; carried further it goes dry and stringy, which is precisely what the larding was meant to prevent.
- Tartare sauceThe recipe only names it. The usual version of the period is mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins or pickles, shallot or onion and parsley. Make it before you fry, as the fillets should go to the table hot.
- YieldCount one fillet per person; two breast halves from each bird, so two chickens serve four.
Larding is one of the oldest fixes in European cookery for the problem of lean meat, and by the late nineteenth century the technique appears in both professional and domestic manuals like this one. A nineteenth-century fowl was generally leaner and tougher than a modern broiler and its white meat dried out badly. Pairing the fried fillet with tartare sauce fits the broader fashion for French-style service in American cookbooks of the period, when a cold mayonnaise-based sauce was a common accompaniment to crumbed and fried dishes, fish especially. The recipe's brevity is itself telling: it is written for a reader assumed to have salt pork in the larder and a larding needle in the drawer.