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Breslin Potted Chicken
Dress, clean, and truss two broilers. Put in a casserole dish, brush over with two and one-half tablespoons melted butter, put on cover, and bake twenty minutes; then add one cup stock and cook until chicken is tender. Thicken stock with one tablespoon, each, butter and flour cooked together, and add one-half cup cooked potato balls, one-third cup canned string beans, cut in small pieces, one-third cup cooked carrot, cut in fancy shapes, and six sautéd mushroom caps.
A hotel dish scaled for a home oven: two small birds braised under cover, then finished with a thickened pan gravy and a garnish of vegetables cut for looks. The original assumes you know your oven and your poultry, so the two things it leaves out are temperature and doneness.
- BroilersA broiler in this period is a young chicken of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb, split or trussed whole. Two of them serve four. Modern Cornish game hens are the closest supermarket equivalent; a single 3 1/2 lb chicken will also work but needs longer.
- Casserole dishHere it genuinely means a covered earthenware or heavy baking dish, not the American baked-noodle sense. A Dutch oven with a tight lid is the direct substitute, and it lets you brown and braise in one vessel.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the book supplies no oven term at all here; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern default. The first twenty minutes are covered, with the birds buttered, before the stock goes in.
- Cook until tenderAfter the stock is added, reckon 30 to 40 minutes more for broilers. Go by an instant-read thermometer at the thigh joint rather than the clock: 165F is done, and small birds pass through juicy into stringy quickly.
- StockOne cup of chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since it reduces under the lid and is then thickened. The giblets and necks simmered while the birds bake will give you a better cup than anything from a carton.
- The thickeningOne tablespoon each butter and flour cooked together is a pale roux; whisk it into the simmering pan liquid off the heat, then return to a gentle boil for two minutes to cook out the flour taste. A cup of stock plus the rendered butter makes a light sauce, not a gravy — add more stock if it tightens too far.
- The garnishPotato balls are scooped with a melon baller and boiled; the carrot "cut in fancy shapes" means rounds, batons or shapes from a small aspic cutter. All the vegetables go in already cooked, purely to heat through in the sauce, so add them at the last minute. Canned string beans can be swapped for blanched fresh ones without altering the dish.
- Mushroom capsSauté six caps in butter over fairly high heat until browned and dry, and season them separately. Dropped into the sauce raw or underdone they will weep water and thin it.
- ServingServes four. Carve or halve the birds, spoon the sauce and vegetables over, and serve straight from the covered dish while hot.
The name follows a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century convention of attaching a hotel or restaurant to a dish, and it has sometimes been said to refer to New York's Hotel Breslin, which opened on Broadway in the first decade of the 1900s; the attribution is traditional rather than documented in the book itself. What makes it a hotel recipe is not the chicken but the finish — potato balls scooped round, carrots cut in fancy shapes, mushroom caps sautéed — the kind of decorative knife work a brigade kitchen had the hands for. The canned string beans in the middle of it all are the tell that this is an American book of its moment: tinned vegetables convenient enough to appear alongside the fancy cutting.