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Asparagus Points (Take a nice white chicken)
Take a nice white chicken, truss it for boiling, and put it into a stewpan or a casserole, breast downwards, in enough water to cover it; add some salt, carrots, onions, and a bunch of herbs.
Let the fowl cook slowly for about half an hour.
Then make a sauce with four ounces of butter, four ounces of flour, and three-quarters of a pint of the liquor the fowl was boiled in, add pepper and nutmeg, and let this cook fifteen minutes.
Beat up the yolks of three eggs; add these with the cream to the sauce, strain it through a hair sieve, stir in two ounces of butter, and work it till it is quite smooth. Take up the chicken, drain it well, place it on a croûte of fried bread, pour the sauce round it, and garnish the side with the heads of green asparagus. Serve the rest of the sauce in a tureen.
A poached chicken in a rich egg-and-butter velouté, filed under Fish by an indexing slip somewhere between manuscript and press. The sauce is the dish; the bird is the vehicle.
- Cook the bird properlyHalf an hour will not cook a whole trussed chicken through, whatever the period books say. A 3-4 lb bird needs roughly 1 to 1 1/4 hours at a bare simmer, and the thickest part of the thigh should read 165F before you take it up.
- Casserole means the potHere 'casserole' is used interchangeably with 'stewpan', i.e. a deep lidded pot used on the hob, rather than a baking dish; the word could cover earthenware oven vessels too, but that is not the sense wanted. Any heavy pot that holds the bird with water to cover will do.
- The cream is unmeasuredThe recipe adds "the cream" without ever having listed it. Something in the region of 1/4 pint (about 1/2 cup) of double cream is consistent with the rest of the proportions, but the original is genuinely silent.
- UnitsThree-quarters of a pint of stock is 15 fl oz in imperial measure, about 1 3/4 cups. Four ounces of butter is 1/2 cup; four ounces of flour is a scant cup.
- Thin the sauceEqual weights of butter and flour against only 15 fl oz of liquor gives a paste, not a sauce. Have extra hot cooking liquor at hand and let it down until it coats a spoon; the cream and yolks will thicken it further.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks go in the sauce cannot return to the boil or it will scramble and no amount of working will bring it back. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce first, then stir them in.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh conical strainer or chinois does the same job. Strain while the sauce is hot, then beat in the final 2 oz butter off the heat for gloss.
- Croûte of fried breadA thick slice of close-crumbed white bread, crusts off, fried in clarified butter until dry and golden. It is there to absorb sauce and hold the bird level on the dish.
- Asparagus and yieldCook the tips separately in salted water and drain them dry, or they will water down the sauce. The dish serves four, with sauce to spare in the tureen.
A boiled fowl masked in what a French kitchen would call a sauce allemande — a velouté built on the poaching liquor, enriched with egg yolks, cream and a final butter finish. The cream that appears in the method but nowhere among the quantities is the sort of loose end that turns up in books compiled from working notes rather than tested in a home kitchen.