Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Chicken Fricassee
Chicken Fricassee
1 year-old chicken 1 tablespoon shortening 2 tablespoons flour 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/2 teaspoon celery salt 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 cup cream 1 egg well beaten Press, wash and cut up the chicken as directed. Wipe each piece, sprinkle with salt and pepper, roll in flour, brown in butter; cover with boiling water and simmer for 40 minutes. Remove the meat, reduce the stock to one pint, to be used for sauce. For the sauce: melt shortening, add flour and seasonings, cook together; add the broth and lemon juice, a little at a time, and cook until smooth. Add the scalded cream, pour this slowly over the egg well beaten, stir well. Arrange the pieces of chicken on a hot platter in something like the order in which they grow. Garnish with toast points and pour the hot sauce over all. Serves 6.
A brown fricassee finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, the standard American treatment for a bird too old to roast. Two things need translating: what "1 year-old chicken" means, and how to keep the sauce from curdling.
- The birdA year-old chicken is a mature fowl of roughly 4 to 5 lb, firm and well flavoured but tough. Nothing sold as a broiler or fryer today is comparable; a large stewing hen from a butcher is the nearest equivalent, and a standard supermarket chicken will be done long before the stated time.
- Simmering timeForty minutes suits a young chicken but will leave a genuine yearling fowl chewy — such a bird wants 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer, until the meat pulls easily from the thigh bone. Judge by the meat, not the clock.
- The hinge: tempering the eggPour the hot sauce slowly into the beaten egg while whisking, then return it to low heat and do not let it boil. Above about 180F the egg scrambles and the sauce breaks; it should only thicken to coating consistency.
- Reducing the stockOne pint is 2 cups. Reduce the poaching liquid uncovered at a brisk simmer, and skim the fat before it goes into the sauce or the finished dish will be greasy.
- ShorteningIn books of this period 'shortening' was used loosely for any solid fat: lard, a vegetable shortening such as Crisco, or butter. Butter works well here and the browning step already calls for it; use butter throughout unless you want the neutral flavour.
- Celery salt and saltCelery salt is still sold, ground celery seed cut with fine salt, and it carries real salinity. Season the sauce at the end rather than up front, since the reduced stock will already be concentrated.
- Scalded creamScalding means heating to just below the boil, about 180F, until the surface shimmers and a rim of small bubbles forms. Warming the cream keeps it from chilling the sauce and stalling the thickening.
- ServingServes 6 with the toast points; the sauce is rich enough that rice or plain boiled potatoes and a sharp green vegetable make a better plate than anything starchy and creamed.
Fricassee comes from the French fricasser, usually glossed as to cut up and cook in fat and liquid, though the word's own origin is disputed; by the eighteenth century English and American cooks used it for almost any jointed bird browned and then stewed in its own gravy. Cookbooks of the period generally distinguished a white fricassee, in which the chicken is not coloured, from a brown one like this, where the pieces are floured and fried first. The finish — hot sauce whisked into beaten egg with cream — is the old liaison, a thickening method older than roux-based sauces. The instruction to lay the pieces out "in something like the order in which they grow" belongs to a period when a cook was still expected to know how a bird comes apart.