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Supreme of Chicken
Remove breast meat from 2 young chickens and trim into shape. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in cream, roll in flour and saute in Crisco until delicately browned. Place in small pan, dot over with Crisco, and bake until tender.
Remove to cutlet-shaped pieces of hot boiled ham (cut very thin), garnish top of each with 3 short stalks of asparagus, seasoned with Crisco, and pour around following sauce: Melt 3 1/2 tablespoons Crisco, add 3 1/2 tablespoons flour, and stir until well blended; then pour on gradually while stirring constantly 1 cup chicken stock and 1/2 cup cream. Bring to boiling point, season with salt and paprika, and add yolk of 1 egg.
A 1910s Crisco-book version of the French suprême de volaille, worth making largely for the sauce. Two things decide whether it works: how long the breasts spend in the oven, and how the egg yolk goes into the sauce.
- The egg yolk is a liaison, not an ingredient to boilBring the sauce to a boil to cook out the flour, then take it off the heat before the yolk goes in. Beat a little hot sauce into the yolk first, return the mixture to the pan, and keep it below a simmer; boiled yolk turns the sauce grainy.
- "Bake until tender" is shortThe book gives no temperature. A trimmed breast fillet wants roughly 10 to 15 minutes in a moderate oven (about 375F) after browning, to 165F at the thickest point. The original's chickens were probably smaller than a modern broiler; today's 8 to 10 oz breasts will be dry long before anything about them reads as tender.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco advertisement, which is why the shortening is named four times in one short recipe. Butter or a butter-oil mix does the same jobs better here, particularly in the roux and on the asparagus.
- Cream instead of egg washDipping in cream then flour gives a thin, pale crust rather than a batter. Do it just before the pan goes on the heat, or the flour turns to paste.
- Supreme, and the trimming"Trim into shape" means removing the tenderloin, cartilage and any ragged edge so each piece is an even oval that cooks at one rate. Save the tenderloins for something else.
- The ham baseBoiled ham cut very thin, warmed through, cut to roughly the footprint of each breast. It seasons the dish from below; a salty country ham will overwhelm it, so use a mild boiled or braised ham.
- AsparagusThree short tips per portion, boiled or steamed until just tender and drained well. Wet asparagus will thin the sauce on the plate.
- Sauce quantity and yieldThe sauce makes about a cup and a half, enough for four servings, which is what two chickens' breasts give. It is a velouté finished with cream and yolk, thick enough to coat; loosen with stock if it sets too stiff.
This comes from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, apparently of the 1910s, and it shows how quickly restaurant French had filtered into American home cooking. Suprême is simply the boneless breast fillet, a cut that French professional kitchens had formalized in the nineteenth century. The construction, protein on a slice of ham with a cream-and-yolk sauce poured around, is the same logic as the older allemande and suprême sauces of the classical repertoire, scaled down for a household range. What marks the page as promotional is the insistence on shortening in places where any French source would have specified butter: Crisco was introduced in 1911, and books like this one were published to teach American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard everywhere at once.