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CHICKEN (a la Creci)
Cut half a pound of bacon into dice, and fry these lightly, then put them into a saucepan, and with them twelve shallots, twelve button mushrooms, two large carrots cut into pieces the size and shape of a walnut, and twelve chestnuts roasted and peeled. Let these be already dressed when they are put into the saucepan. Add the flesh of a chicken cut into fillets, cover with good brown gravy, and stew gently for a quarter of an hour, when a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, a blade of mace pounded, and a glass of Madeira, or any white wine, may be added. Simmer for five minutes longer, take out the chicken, and place it on a dish; if necessary, thicken the gravy a little, then pour it over the meat. Place the chestnuts, carrots, etc., round it, together with a few mushrooms. Garnish the dish with toasted sippets. Probable cost, chicken, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A brown fricassee of chicken fillets with a garnish of bacon, chestnuts and turned carrots. The whole thing hangs on the word "dressed": every vegetable goes into the pan already cooked, so the fifteen minutes of stewing is for flavour, not for softening anything.
- "Let these be already dressed"The shallots, mushrooms, carrots and chestnuts must all be cooked through before they meet the gravy — glazed or sauteed separately, the chestnuts roasted and peeled as stated. Raw carrots will still be hard at the end of twenty minutes and the dish falls apart.
- The chicken timingFifteen minutes plus five is generous for skinless breast fillets, which are done at an internal 165F and turn stringy past that. Thigh meat cut into similar pieces handles the full time better; if using breast, cut it thick and check early.
- A glass of MadeiraIn Victorian cookery books a wineglass is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Modern taste can stretch to 1/3 cup without unbalancing the sauce.
- Good brown gravyNot gravy from a roast but the book's brown sauce — a reduced brown stock, lightly thickened with roux. Enough to cover the contents of the pan. Reduced brown chicken or veal stock does the same job.
- A blade of maceOne blade is a single piece of the lacy aril around the nutmeg, pounded down to roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace. It tastes close to nutmeg but sharper and less sweet.
- ChestnutsTwelve fresh chestnuts, scored and roasted, peel down to about 4 oz. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute and skip the worst of the work; the tinned ones in syrup are not.
- Toasted sippetsTriangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, stood around the rim of the dish. They soak up the sauce and were a common border for a stew served on a flat platter.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt assumes an unsalted homemade stock and unsmoked bacon. With commercial stock and modern cured bacon, salt only at the end.
- YieldThree or four as the book says, from one chicken's worth of fillets — perhaps a pound to a pound and a half of meat. It wants plain boiled or steamed potatoes rather than anything else rich.
The name points to Crecy, a French place-name long associated in cookery with carrots — which of the towns called Crecy is meant, Crecy-la-Chapelle in Brie or Crecy-en-Ponthieu in Picardy, is disputed — and anything a la Crecy generally means carrots are in it, most familiarly the carrot soup or puree. Here they are cut into walnut-sized pieces and turned, which is the older sense of the garnish: shaped vegetables arranged around the meat rather than blended into it. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, worked steadily through the French repertoire and rendered it for English kitchens with the wine allowance loosened ("Madeira, or any white wine") and the price per chicken printed at the foot. That two shillings and sixpence is a reminder that a chicken was still a considered purchase in a middle-class household, and that the bacon, chestnuts and sippets are all there to make one bird stretch to four plates.