Home › Entrées › Poulet à la Princesse
Poulet à la Princesse
Ingredients.
A Chicken.
Carrots. Onions. Bunch of Herbs.
Four ounces of Flour.
Three-quarters of a pint of Liquor.
Three yolks of Eggs.
Quarter of a pint of Double Cream.
Six ounces of Butter.
The page gives only the ingredient list — the method was assumed knowledge in a cookery-school book of this type. What follows is what the quantities tell you, plus the points where the dish can go wrong.
- The hinge: the liaison must not boilEgg yolks slackened with double cream are stirred into the hot sauce off the heat, and the pan is then held below a simmer until it coats a spoon. Boiling scrambles the yolks and the sauce is likely to curdle.
- "Liquor" is stock, not drinkIt means the strained poaching liquid from the chicken and its vegetables. Three-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, roughly 1 3/4 US cups.
- Roux proportionsFour ounces of flour to six of butter and only 15 fl oz of liquid is a very stiff velouté by modern standards. A modern cook may prefer less flour, or to thin the finished sauce with more stock until it just coats.
- Bunch of herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string or in a leek leaf, lifted out before the sauce is finished.
- Double creamBritish double cream runs about 48% butterfat. US heavy cream at 36% works but is thinner; do not substitute half-and-half in a yolk liaison, as the lower fat makes curdling more likely.
- The birdPoulet is simply a chicken; a small roasting bird is the likely intention. Poach rather than boil hard — the water should barely shiver — and take it to 165F in the thigh.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. One chicken with this quantity of sauce would plausibly serve about four as a modern main, or more as one course among several in an Edwardian dinner.
In the classical French repertoire that British cookery schools taught at the turn of the twentieth century, a garnish name was a shorthand a trained cook was expected to read without explanation: à la princesse is generally associated with asparagus tips and a pale cream sauce. Only the second half of that is present here — the ingredient list names no asparagus, and builds a chicken poached with aromatics, its liquor turned into a velouté and finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison. That the page carries no method at all is itself informative. Books of this kind were often written for students who had watched the demonstration and needed only the proportions, or for a cook-housekeeper who knew perfectly well how to make a velouté and wanted to know how much flour to weigh. The entrée slot they filled sat between the fish and the roast in a formal dinner, and dishes of poached white meat under a pale sauce were staples of it.