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Chicken à la Providence
Prepare and boil a chicken, following recipe for Boiled Fowl. The liquor should be reduced to two cups, and used for making sauce, with two tablespoons each butter and flour cooked together. Add to sauce one-half cup each of cooked carrot (cut in fancy shapes) and green peas, one teaspoon lemon juice, yolks two eggs, salt and pepper. Place chicken on hot platter, surround with sauce, and sprinkle chicken and sauce with one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
A late-Victorian velouté built on the chicken's own cooking liquor, finished with egg yolks. Everything hangs on how you handle those yolks.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolks go inBeat the yolks with a ladleful of the hot sauce, return the mixture to the pan, and hold it below a simmer — roughly 175-180°F — stirring until it thickens. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce turns grainy and thin.
- "Boil a chicken" means a stewing hen"Boil a chicken" and the cross-reference to Boiled Fowl -- Recipes of this kind generally assume a larger, tougher boiling fowl simmered slowly rather than a young bird; check the Boiled Fowl entry for the timing the book actually gives. A supermarket 4-5 lb roasting chicken is done in about 60-75 minutes; pull it when the thigh reads 175°F, or the breast will be cotton.
- Reducing the liquorWhatever quantity of broth the boiling leaves you with, it has to come down to two cups. Strain and skim first, and salt only at the very end, since reduction concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of stock gives a deliberately light pouring sauce, not a coating one. It is meant to pool around the bird on the platter; the yolks add the final body.
- Carrot "in fancy shapes"Period cooks used small tin vegetable cutters or turned the carrot into olive shapes with a paring knife. Cook the carrot until just tender before it goes into the sauce — it will not soften further at this temperature.
- PeasFrozen peas, thawed, are closer to the intended tender young pea than canned. Add them at the last minute so they keep their colour.
- Lemon juice lastAdd it after the sauce is off direct heat. Acid in a hot yolk-thickened sauce encourages curdling if the pan is still on the burner.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. Have the platter genuinely hot and the sauce finished at the same moment — this dish does not hold, and reheating the sauce will break it.
The name follows the nineteenth-century restaurant habit of tagging a dish with a place: à la Providence, à la Reine, à la Maryland, most of them French kitchen conventions rather than statements of origin. Behind it is the classic poached fowl whose broth is reduced to a velouté, thickened with a yolk liaison and garnished with carrot and peas — in French practice a yolk-thickened velouté of this sort is closer to sauce allemande or poulette than to sauce suprême, which is finished with cream. If this comes from Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896, it shows how such books handled French technique: it does not repeat the boiling instructions but points back to Boiled Fowl, then treats the cooking liquor as the whole point rather than something to be poured away. That thrift, and the insistence on cut vegetables as decoration, are both very much of the period.