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Chicken à la Stanley (Melt one-fourth cup butter add)
Melt one-fourth cup butter, add one large onion thinly sliced, and two broilers cut in pieces for serving; cover, and cook slowly ten minutes; then add one cup Chicken Stock, and cook until meat is tender. Remove chickens, rub stock and onions through a sieve, and add one and onehalf tablespoons each butter and flour cooked together. Add cream to make sauce of the right consistency. Season with salt and pepper. Arrange chicken on serving dish, pour around sauce, and garnish dish with bananas cut in diagonal slices dipped in flour and sautéd in butter.
A gentle braise that depends entirely on the onion staying pale — this is a white dish, and any browning shows in the finished sauce. A few of Farmer's terms need translating.
- BroilersA broiler in this period is a young chicken, roughly 1 to 2 lb, cut into serving pieces. Two of them come to about one modern 3.5-4 lb chicken cut up, or eight bone-in thighs and drumsticks; that should serve four to six, though the recipe itself gives no yield.
- Keep everything paleThe ten minutes under the lid is a sweat, not a sear. Butter and onion should never take colour, and the heat needs to stay low enough that nothing sizzles hard — the sauce is meant to finish ivory.
- Cooking time"Until meat is tender" is about 25 to 30 minutes of covered simmering for bone-in pieces after the stock goes in. Thighs read 175F, breast 165F.
- One cup of stock is not muchWith a tight lid the chicken releases its own juices, but check once or twice that the pan has not gone dry. The reduced liquid plus onion is the whole body of the sauce.
- Rubbing through a sieveA food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender does the same work in seconds. The point is a smooth onion purée, not a strained broth — do not discard the solids.
- The butter and flourEqual parts cooked together is a white roux: melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook a minute or two without colour before whisking it into the hot onion stock. Simmer a few minutes more to lose the raw flour taste.
- CreamHeavy cream, added off a hard boil and warmed through. The quantity is unspecified — start with a quarter cup and stop when the sauce coats a spoon.
- The bananasUse fruit that is ripe but still firm, cut on a long diagonal about half an inch thick, floured lightly and fried quickly in hot butter. They collapse if left in the pan, so cook them last and put them straight on the platter.
Dishes labelled \a to the grand-hotel French repertoire of the late nineteenth century, where the name signalled a pale onion-scented cream sauce, usually with mushrooms and often with a curry note. The name is generally traced to Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh-American explorer whose African journeys were front-page news in the 1870s and 1880s, and the banana garnish — otherwise inexplicable beside a plain braised chicken — is the standing evidence for that story, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in the Boston Cooking School book shows a restaurant dish reduced to a household scale: two cheap broilers, one onion, a cup of stock, and a garnish of a fruit that by the 1890s was arriving in New England ports in quantity and no longer counted as a luxury.