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Chaud Froid of Chicken
I cold roast chicken 1 tablespoonful of butter 1 tablespoonful of flour 1/2 pint of cream Salt and pepper to taste Strip the skin carefully from the chicken, and cut the meat into nice pieces, about an inch and a half long and an inch wide. Now put the butter in a frying pan to melt, add to it the flour; mix until smooth; add the cream, stir continually until it boils and thickens; add salt and pepper. Into this sauce dip each piece of chicken, and place the pieces on a dish, one not touching the other. Stand away until very cold. When cold arrange the pieces nicely on a dish, sprinkle them with a little parsley chopped very fine, garnish with aspic jelly and parsley, and serve.
A cold buffet dish from the era before mechanical refrigeration, and one that depends entirely on getting the coating to set. A few notes before starting.
- The hinge: a sauce that clingsOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a half pint of cream gives a fairly loose cream sauce, and a proper chaud-froid coating needs to hold on the meat as it cools. Either simmer the sauce down until it coats a spoon heavily, or dissolve about a teaspoon of powdered gelatin in it off the heat; the classic form of the sauce is set with aspic in much the same way.
- MeasuresA half pint is one cup of cream; heavy cream behaves best here. One cold roast chicken probably means a bird of around 3-4 lb, which should give somewhere near 2-3 cups of picked meat and serve about four as a light main course.
- Chill in the refrigerator, not the pantry"Stand away until very cold" was written for a cool larder. Cooked chicken in cream should go into the refrigerator, uncovered on a rack set over a tray so the coating firms without sweating, and be held there until service.
- Dip cold meat, warm sauceThe sauce should be lukewarm and fluid when the pieces go in; the chicken should be thoroughly cold. Hot sauce on cold meat drags and slides off, and it also puts the chicken back into the temperature range you want to avoid.
- Season above your instinctCold blunts salt and pepper noticeably. Taste the sauce warm, then taste a coated piece once chilled and correct on the second batch if needed. A grating of nutmeg or a spoon of reduced chicken stock in the sauce adds the savour the original leaves to the aspic.
- Aspic jellyRorer expected the cook to have clarified jellied stock on hand; no recipe for it is given on this page. Strong chicken stock set with gelatin, chilled firm, then chopped or cut into cubes serves the purpose as garnish around the platter.
- Skin and boneStripping the skin is not fussiness. Skin under a cream coating turns flabby and grey, and the flat, even surfaces of skinned breast and thigh meat are what take the sauce cleanly.
Chaud-froid is French for "hot-cold": a dish cooked hot, then coated with a sauce that is served cold and set. The term and technique are attested from the eighteenth century; it is the elaborate buffet form that belongs to the nineteenth-century professional kitchen, where cold buffet work was a display art and pieces were masked in white or brown chaud-froid sauce, glazed with aspic and set out on mirrored platters. Its appearance in a book called Hot Weather Dishes shows the idea being pulled down to household scale: Sarah Tyson Rorer, who ran the Philadelphia Cooking School and wrote prolifically for American home cooks in the 1880s and 1890s, was interested in summer meals that did not require standing over a range, and in using up a cold roast bird without serving it plainly sliced again. The elaborate garnishing survives; the kitchen brigade does not.