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Stewed Chicken with Onions
Dress, clean, and cut in pieces for serving, two chickens. Cook in a small quantity of water with eighteen tiny young onions. Remove chicken to serving-dish as soon as tender, and when onions are soft drain from stock and reduce stock to one and one-half cups. Make sauce of three tablespoons butter, four tablespoons flour, stock, and one-half cup heavy cream; then add yolks three eggs, salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste. Pour sauce over chicken and onions.
A plain fricassée finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The whole dish turns on how the sauce is handled at the end.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil, or the eggs will curdle into threads. Temper the beaten yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce, stir them back off the heat, and return the pan to low heat only until it thickens enough to coat a spoon.
- "Dress and clean"Nineteenth-century shorthand for plucking, singeing and drawing a bird; the recipe calls for cutting it into serving pieces as a separate step. Two supermarket chickens cut into eight pieces each is the rough equivalent, though modern birds run larger than those intended here.
- Size of birdThe chickens intended here were young and small, perhaps 2.5-3 lb each, and would come tender in 40-50 minutes of gentle simmering. Larger modern birds want an hour or more at a bare simmer; a hard boil toughens the breast before the legs are done.
- "A small quantity of water"Enough to come partway up the pieces, not to cover them. Roughly 2-3 cups, since the finished sauce needs only a cup and a half of reduced stock. Season the cooking liquid, or the sauce will be flat.
- The onionsEighteen "tiny young onions" means pearl or small boiling onions, about a pound. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and need only 10-15 minutes; fresh ones are easier to peel after a brief blanch.
- The sauce baseThree tablespoons butter to four of flour is a slightly dry roux, with more flour than fat. Cook the roux a minute or two without colouring it before adding the stock.
- Finishing acidThe lemon juice is not optional garnish; it cuts the cream and yolks. Add it last, off the heat, a teaspoon at a time.
- YieldTwo chickens with sauce serves six to eight. Rice, boiled potatoes or toast points take up the sauce, which is generous.
Fricassée of chicken thickened at the last with egg yolks and cream is long established in both the English and French repertoires. The technique is the classical liaison: yolks and cream stirred into a hot sauce off the heat, giving richness and gloss without further flour.