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FOWL FILLETS (au Supreme)
Cut from three fowls as many neat fillets as you can; lay them in pairs, with forcemeat between, in a dish of clarified butter, and then fry them in some more butter, and dip them well in bread-crumbs. Fry also bread, cut as nearly the same size as possible. Heat the fillets in supreme sauce (see SUPREME SAUCE), but be especially careful not to allow them to boil in it. When serving, pour the sauce over the fillets piled in the centre of the dish, but do not moisten the bread with it. Place the bread alternately with the fillets round the dish, and leave the sauce where it was poured in the centre. Time for the fowl to lie in butter, half an hour; to fry, ten minutes. Sufficient for a dish.
A Victorian entrée built on three birds' worth of breast meat, sandwiched with forcemeat, crumbed, fried, and finished in an egg-and-cream sauce. Two instructions in the original need reading carefully before you start.
- Never let the sauce boilSupreme sauce is a velouté enriched with cream and egg yolks, and yolk-thickened sauces are liable to curdle if allowed to simmer. Hold it well below a bubble and warm the fillets through in it off direct heat.
- The crumbing order is garbledThe crumbing order looks inverted -- as printed, the fillets are fried and then dipped in crumbs. The butter they have been lying in is the coating medium here, so crumb them before they go into the pan rather than after.
- What a fillet means hereThe filet is the breast lobe and the filet mignon the little strip beneath it. Three fowls give six large fillets and six small ones; paired with forcemeat between, that makes roughly six sandwiches.
- Fowl versus chickenA Victorian fowl was usually a mature bird, larger-boned and firmer than a modern broiler. Six supermarket breasts, split horizontally into flat scallops, stand in well and cook faster.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it will take a hot fry without burning. Ghee is the easy substitute.
- ForcemeatA seasoned pounded stuffing, typically pale poultry or veal meat with breadcrumbs, butter and egg. Keep the layer thin, or the outside crust colours before the centre is hot.
- Frying time and donenessTen minutes assumes a shallow pan of butter over moderate heat and thin fillets. Because there is raw forcemeat inside, check the centre reaches 165F rather than trusting the clock.
- The breadFried croûtons cut to match the fillets, arranged alternately round the rim. Keeping them dry is the whole point of pouring the sauce only into the centre; sauced croûtons collapse within a minute.
- Yield"Sufficient for a dish" means one entrée course at a multi-course dinner, not a stated number of dinner plates.
À la suprême came into English kitchens with the French repertoire of the nineteenth century, and by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled the word suprême was doing double duty: the pale velouté sauce enriched with cream and yolks, and the breast fillet of a bird that the sauce most often dressed. The dish is often associated with the service à la russe dinner, though entrées of this kind were served under service à la française as well; an entrée like this arrived as one of several small made dishes between fish and roast, and the visual arrangement — fillets piled in the centre, fried croûtons standing round the rim, sauce confined to the middle so nothing goes soggy — mattered as much as the flavour. The instruction to use three fowls for a single dish is a quiet indication of the household this book addressed.