Home › The Principles of Cookery › CHICKEN (a la Sainte Menehould)
CHICKEN (a la Sainte Menehould)
Fricassee a chicken so that the gravy, when cold, will be a solid jelly; put the pieces of meat between two dishes till cold; egg them well, strew over them finely-grated bread-crumbs, then dip them into egg, and then into bread-crumbs again. Fry them in hot butter or lard, and send a rich brown sauce to table with them. Time to fry, ten or fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for three persons.
This is a two-stage dish: the chicken is fully cooked and chilled before it is ever breaded, and the frying is only for colour and crust. Reading it as a single fry-until-done recipe will give you a burnt coating over dry meat.
- Start with a proper fricasseeThe chicken is jointed and gently poached or stewed until tender; the recipe gives neither a bird size nor a cooking time. The instruction that the gravy set to "a solid jelly" when cold is a test of the stock, not a garnish: it needs enough gelatine — from feet, wings or a veal bone — to firm up.
- The chilling is the hingePutting the pieces between two dishes until cold lets the jellied cooking liquor set around the meat, which helps the crumb coat hold. Chilling thoroughly, overnight in the refrigerator, is better than an hour on a windowsill.
- Double crumbingEgg, crumb, egg, crumb — the double coat is deliberate and gives the thick shell the dish is known for. Use dry, fine crumbs rather than coarse panko; the period texture is closer to a smooth golden crust than a shaggy one.
- Frying timeTen to fifteen minutes reflects a cooler pan and a thick crust; the recipe specifies only that the fat be hot. Cold cooked pieces need only long enough to colour deeply and heat through, turning once. Butter alone will brown too fast; clarified butter, lard or a butter-and-oil mix behaves better.
- "A rich brown sauce"Most likely a brown-roux-and-brown-stock sauce of the espagnole type, though the recipe does not say. The jellied fricassee liquor, reheated and reduced with a little of it, makes a sound modern substitute and wastes nothing.
- Cost and yield"2s. 6d." is two shillings and sixpence, a late-Victorian price with no useful modern equivalent. Three servings from a whole bird is generous by today's reckoning; four is realistic with a vegetable and potatoes.
The name points to Sainte-Menehould, a town in the Argonne in north-eastern France long associated with pigs' trotters cooked for hours until the bones themselves are edible, then rolled in breadcrumbs and browned. By the nineteenth century "\" had become a general method in French cookery and, from there, in English books like Cassell's: cook the thing slowly until quite tender, coat it in egg and crumbs, and colour it in fat. Applying it to chicken is very much the logic of a Victorian household dictionary he pressing between dishes, the pointed note on cost for three persons all belong to a kitchen where nothing cooked was allowed to go to waste.