Clean and season a fat hen. Put a few slices of chopped bacon in a saucepan; let get hot. Add the chicken with 1 carrot, 1 onion, 2 stalks of celery chopped fine, 1 herb bouquet, 1 bay-leaf, a few cloves and allspice and 2 blades of mace, 2 sprigs of parsley and 1 cup of hot water. Let all stew until tender; then add some chopped mushrooms and pour over all 1 cup of hot rich cream.
A braised whole hen finished with cream — closer to a French poule en cocotte than the flour-thickened bechamel the title suggests. The original assumes you know how long a boiling fowl takes and how to keep cream from breaking.
- "A fat hen"This means an older laying hen, a stewing fowl of 5-6 lb with firm flesh and plenty of fat. A supermarket roasting chicken of 4-5 lb will substitute, but it cooks in about half the time and gives a thinner broth.
- Cooking timeAn old hen needs 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer to become tender; a modern chicken needs 60-75 minutes. Go by the thigh joint pulling loose rather than the clock, and take the breast to 165F.
- One cup of water is not a mistakeThis is a braise, not a boil. The bird sits in a covered pan and steams in its own juices with the aromatics; the liquid at the end should be a concentrated cupful, not a broth.
- The hinge: adding the creamPour the hot cream over at the end and let it warm through without boiling. Cream reduced hard in a salty, vegetable-heavy pan can separate. Heavy cream at 36% fat holds far better than half-and-half.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold today mostly ground. Two blades is somewhere around a quarter to a half teaspoon ground — enough to notice, not enough to identify.
- Herb bouquetA bouquet garni: thyme, parsley stems and a bay leaf tied together or bagged in cheesecloth so it can be lifted out. The recipe lists bay and parsley separately as well, which is simply doubling down.
- BaconBacon of this period was generally dry-cured and likely saltier than most sliced bacon now. Use slab bacon or salt pork, render it gently, and hold off on salting the bird until you taste the finished sauce.
- MushroomsAdd them in the last 15 minutes or they turn grey and give up their liquid into the braise. Brown them separately in butter if you want any color in the dish, which is otherwise pale throughout.
- ServingA 5 lb hen serves four to six. Carve the bird, strain or leave the vegetables as you like, and serve with rice, boiled potatoes or plain noodles to take the cream.
The name is a genteel stretch. A true sauce bechamel is a white roux loosened with milk, one of the mother sauces codified in the nineteenth century and named for Louis de Bechameil, a steward in the household of Louis XIV — though it is generally accepted that he had nothing to do with inventing it. What this recipe actually makes is a cream-finished braise, and on this page at least "a la bechamel" seems to mean little more than "served in something white and creamy." That drift is the point of a book like this one: a day-a-page tour of national cuisines aimed at a home cook who wanted the vocabulary of French cooking without a French kitchen behind her. The technique underneath is sound and much older than the label — a tough old laying hen, past her productive years and too sinewy to roast, braised slowly with root vegetables and warm spices until she surrenders.