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Chicken Sautes, with Oyster Sauce
Cut up in the ordinary way, and after being well trimmed, place in a saucepan with some clarified butter, seasoned with pepper and salt, and fried of a light brown color. Pour off the butter, add three dozen parboiled oysters with their liquor (previously reduced in quantity by boiling), and two large gravy-spoonfuls of drawn butter sauce, a piece of glaze, and juice of half a lemon; set the whole on fire to simmer five minutes, and dish up entrée with fried croutons of bread round it.
A late-Victorian entrée in the French manner: chicken browned in butter, then finished in an oyster-and-butter sauce. Two things need attention — the chicken has to reach a safe temperature before the five-minute simmer, and the oysters must not be cooked twice.
- The hinge: cook the chicken through firstThe instruction to fry "of a light brown color" gives no guarantee the pieces are cooked through. Brown them, then keep them going over moderate heat until the thighs read 175F and the breast 165F — figure 20 to 30 minutes for a cut-up bird — because five minutes of simmering in sauce will not finish them.
- Oysters, once onlyParboiling and then simmering five minutes gives you rubber. Bring the shucked oysters and their liquor just to the point where the edges ruffle, lift them out, reduce the liquor, and return the oysters in the last 30 seconds off the heat.
- Three dozen oystersOn the order of a pint and a half of shucked oysters, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb depending on size. Save every drop of liquor; well reduced, it is the backbone of the sauce.
- Gravy-spoonfulA serving spoon, not a teaspoon. Equivalents varied, but reckon very roughly 2 tablespoons each, so something in the region of 1/4 cup of sauce in total — and the recipe asks for large ones.
- Drawn butter sauceNot simply melted butter. The period sauce is a light roux of 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp flour cooked in a cup of water or light stock, finished with more butter off the heat. A thin velouté made with chicken stock does the same job.
- A piece of glazeMeat stock reduced to a sticky, near-solid brown extract, kept in a jar and cut off in lumps. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons of demi-glace, or a modest amount of concentrated stock paste; it is there for depth and colour, not for salt.
- Clarified butterCalled for because whole butter's milk solids scorch during a long sauté. Clarified butter or ghee still behaves better here than plain butter.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities; a single cut-up chicken would serve about four as an entrée. The croutons are shapes of white bread fried in butter and set around the rim of the dish; put them on at the last moment or they soften.
Chicken and oysters together look odd now but were unremarkable in nineteenth-century American cooking, when oysters were cheap, abundant along the whole Atlantic seaboard, and shipped inland by rail in barrels — they turn up in stuffings, sauces, patties and soups throughout the period's cookbooks. The vocabulary here is straight from professional French kitchen practice as it filtered into English-language household manuals: sauté, glaze, entrée, croutons set round the dish. Drawn butter sauce and a jar of homemade glaze are often said to have been standing preparations kept on hand, chiefly in professional kitchens, which would be why the recipe can call for them in a single phrase and assume the cook knows what is meant. The compressed, ingredient-list-free style is typical of compilations aimed at readers who already had the basics and wanted the arrangement.