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Fricassee of Chicken
Skin the chickens (two), cut them up and boil. Take a quart of milk, add a little parsley, onion and pepper, boil and strain it, then return to the fire. Rub a tablespoonful of butter with a tablespoonful of flour thoroughly together and stir into the milk, and let it boil until the consistency of soft custard. Beat the yolks of two eggs and pour the milk into it, stirring all the time, then add a wine glass of sherry wine. The dressing must not be boiled after the eggs and wine are added, or else it will curdle. -Mrs. Trotter, New York City.
A white fricassee in the old sense: the birds are poached rather than browned, and the interest is all in the egg-and-sherry sauce built separately. Two things decide whether it works.
- The hingeOnce the yolks and sherry go in, the sauce must never come back to a boil. Keep it below about 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; the note about curdling in the original is literal, not cautious.
- Temper the yolks properlyThe instruction to pour the hot milk into the beaten yolks is correct and worth following exactly. Add the first ladleful in a thin stream while whisking, then the rest, and only then return the mixture to low heat.
- "Two chickens"Market birds of this period were generally smaller than today's. Two of today's 4 lb chickens will feed a large table; a single large chicken, or two small fryers, matches the intent.
- Boil means simmerCut-up chicken wants a bare simmer, covered, 40 to 50 minutes, until the thigh meat pulls easily from the bone. A hard boil shreds the breast and toughens it.
- Keep the cooking liquidThe recipe says nothing about what becomes of it. Poach in lightly salted water with an onion and a few peppercorns, then use a little of the strained broth to thin the sauce if it tightens.
- A wine glassIn cookbooks of this period a wine glass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Use a dry sherry such as fino or amontillado; cream sherry will make the sauce sweet.
- Butter and flourA tablespoon of each into a quart of milk gives a thin sauce; the original nonetheless has it boiled to "the consistency of soft custard" before the yolks go in. Rub them to a smooth paste and whisk it into the simmering milk in small pieces so it does not lump.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified anywhere. Salt the poaching water and taste the finished sauce; unsalted, this is very flat. A grating of nutmeg is traditional in white fricassees.
- ServingPour the sauce over the drained chicken and serve on rice, boiled potatoes or buttered toast. Serves six to eight from one large bird.
Fricassee arrived in English cookery from French practice, and the word came to cover two treatments: a brown fricassee, where the pieces are floured and fried first, and a white one like this, where the meat is poached pale and finished in a cream or egg-thickened sauce. The egg-yolk liaison sharpened with wine is the older, richer treatment, closer to a French blanquette than to the milk-gravy chicken fricassee of American farm kitchens. The sherry is of a piece with a long-standing American habit of keeping fortified Spanish wine to hand and using it by the wine glass in soups, sauces and puddings. The recipe is signed by a contributor in New York City, in the manner of a book collecting recipes from named housekeepers, and the terse phrasing assumes a cook who already knew how long a chicken takes.