Creole Chicken
Cut a chicken in pieces for serving; season with salt and pepper. Melt four tablespoons butter, add one fourth cup finely chopped onion, chicken, and sauté until golden brown. Remove chicken; add four tablespoons flour, two cups chicken stock, two cups stewed tomato, one red pepper finely chopped, one half cup celery, and salt to taste. Replace chicken in sauce, and simmer until tender.
Arrange on dish; surround with sauce; garnish with cooked macaroni and parsley.
A straightforward braise that only needs a few translations and one adjustment to how long the chicken sits in the sauce.
- Chicken sizeA 3½–4 lb bird cut into eight or ten serving pieces is right for these quantities. Bone-in thighs and drumsticks alone work well and hold up better to the simmer than breast.
- "One red pepper"'finely chopped' suggests a fresh sweet red pepper rather than a chile: one medium bell pepper, seeded and chopped. If you want heat, add a pinch of cayenne.
- Stewed tomatoTwo cups of stewed tomatoes, plainly cooked down. Crushed canned whole tomatoes with their juice are the closest substitute; measure out two cups and drain off some liquid if it looks thin.
- CeleryHalf a cup means chopped celery stalk, measured after chopping — roughly two ribs.
- Order of operationsBrown the chicken in the butter and onion, lift it out, then stir the flour into the fat and let it cook a minute or two before the stock goes in. That brief cooking is what keeps the sauce from tasting pasty.
- Simmer time"Until tender" is 35–45 minutes at a bare simmer for dark meat; breast pieces are done in about 20 and can be added later. Boiling hard will tighten the meat and split the butter out of the sauce.
- Macaroni garnishCook and drain the macaroni separately and ring it around the platter — it is a border, not a component of the braise. Elbow macaroni or short tubes suit it.
- YieldServes four to five as a main course with the macaroni.
Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks often used "Creole" loosely, to mean something like a dish built on a sauce of tomatoes, onion, sweet pepper and celery, and by around the turn of the century the label seems to have traveled far from New Orleans into general household cookery — the same formula appears attached to eggs, shrimp, cod and rice. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate and cocoa, carries a full complement of ordinary meat and poultry cookery alongside the confectionery it was written to sell, and this chicken is representative of the plainer, butter-and-flour Northern reading of Creole cooking: no roux browned past blond, no filé, no cayenne unless the cook chooses it. The macaroni border is a period touch, and is often said to reflect the era's fondness for garnishing platters with starch rather than serving it alongside.