Home › Entrées › Baked Chicken
Baked Chicken
2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon carrot 1/2 cup forcemeat 1 pint stock tablespoon salt 2 egg yolks 2 tablespoons flour Melt butter; add vegetables; cook ten minutes. Remove vegetables; add forcemeat, stock, salt and flour; cook until stiff; add yolks of eggs and lemon juice. Spread this mixture on the chicken legs. Dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, place in baking dish, and cook in hot oven until chicken is tender, basting with cream. Serve around slices of tomato garnished with mayonnaise. 3 chicken breasts 1 can mushrooms 1 pint consommé 2 cups forcemeat Chicken Suprême 6 truffles 6 slices cooked tongue ½ cup butter 1 tablespoon salt 1 cup Croquette Sauce Divide each chicken breast into four fillets, separating the large fillet from the small fillet; brush large fillet with butter; spread with forcemeat; cover with small fillet score small fillet diagonally; insert thin slices of truffles in each gash. Cut slices of tongue half an inch larger than large fillet and place in baking dish with fillet on each piece.
Mix Croquette Sauce, consommé, chopped mushrooms, and cook ten minutes, add more seasoning if required, and pour around cooked fillets.
The fillets may be steamed until tender or cooked in the oven and basted with cream.
VEGETABLE ENTRÉES
Two separate recipes have run together here: a stuffed baked chicken leg and Chicken Suprême, stuffed breast fillets. Read the ingredient lists as belonging to the paragraph that follows each, and note that several fractions have dropped out of the original typesetting.
- Missing fractions"cup forcemeat" and "tablespoon salt" have lost their fractions in printing. A tablespoon of salt for one pint of stock is far too much; treat it as a scant teaspoon and season to taste. The forcemeat is most likely ½ cup for the legs, since the mixture only needs to coat them.
- ForcemeatA seasoned ground-meat paste; in a chicken dish of this date it would most often be raw chicken or veal worked with cream and egg, close to what a modern cook would make in a food processor as a mousseline. The book gives no formula here and evidently assumes one elsewhere; any fine chicken farce will do.
- Hot oven425–450F. At that heat the crumb coating on the legs sets quickly; move to 375F if the crust colours before the meat is done. Cook all the poultry to at least 165F internal; legs are better at about 175F at the bone.
- The stiff panadeThe forcemeat, stock, salt and flour are cooked down until the mixture holds its shape — this is the hinge of the leg recipe. If it is still loose it will slide off the chicken in the oven. Cool it before spreading, then add the yolks and lemon juice off the heat so they do not curdle.
- Basting with creamCream scorches faster than butter or stock. Baste sparingly and low in the oven, or the sugars in the dairy will blacken the crumbs before the meat is tender.
- Truffles and tongueSix truffles is a period luxury flourish; a small jar of truffle peelings, or nothing at all, is the practical substitute. Cooked tongue can be replaced with thin slices of ham or prosciutto cut half an inch wider than the fillet, as the recipe directs — the slice appears to serve as a base for the fillet in the dish.
- Canned mushrooms and consomméCanned mushrooms were widely used in kitchens of this date and carry their own salty liquor — drain them and taste before adding more salt. Any good chicken stock stands in for consommé; the sauce is only reduced ten minutes, so start with something already flavourful.
- YieldThree chicken breasts divided into fillets serve about six as an entrée in the older sense of a small course; four as a main dish. The leg preparation serves as many as you have legs.
Chicken Suprême belongs to the professional French repertoire that American cookbooks were busy translating for domestic kitchens around 1900: suprême simply means the boned breast, and the trick of splitting it into a large and small fillet, stuffing between them, and studding the surface with truffle is straight out of the Escoffier-era kitchen. Tongue slices under the fillet, canned mushrooms in the sauce, and tomato garnished with mayonnaise are the marks of the era's entrée course — small, decorated, served with a sauce made separately and poured around rather than over. That this appears in a book published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, says a good deal about how such books worked: the chocolate recipes sold the product, and the rest of the volume established the publisher as an authority on the whole American table.