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Boiled Chicken with Poulette Sauce
Boil a chicken in broth seasoned with an onion stuck with three cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs and a little salt and pepper. Turn half a pound of mushrooms and prepare one pound of poulette sauce. When the fowl is done, dish it, garnish with the mushrooms, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A short entry that assumes you already have poulette sauce and know how to trim a mushroom. Both assumptions need unpacking, and the poaching needs a temperature.
- Poulette sauceNot something you buy. It is a velouté — chicken stock thickened with a white roux — finished off the heat with egg yolks beaten into cream, then lemon juice and chopped parsley. One pound means about two cups of finished sauce, enough for a whole bird.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boilOnce the yolk-and-cream liaison goes in, the sauce is held below a simmer, around 180F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into grains that no amount of whisking will bring back.
- "Boil" means poachA hard boil shreds the breast and clouds the broth. Bring the liquid up, then hold it at a bare tremble, 175–185F, until the thigh joint reads 165F — roughly 50 to 70 minutes for a 4 lb bird. Keep it covered and barely moving.
- "Turn" the mushroomsTourner: pare the caps into shallow flutes with a small knife so they look uniform. Largely decorative. Quartered caps taste identical; simmer them in a little of the broth with lemon juice to keep them pale.
- Onion piqué and sweet herbsOnion pique and sweet herbs -- The clove-studded onion is standard; a "bunch of sweet herbs" is typically parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, though the recipe does not specify. Tie them or bag them so you can lift them out cleanly before the broth becomes sauce base.
- Use the poaching brothThe recipe does not say what the sauce is built on, but the classical practice is to use the liquid the bird cooked in. Ladle off a couple of cups once the chicken is nearly done and make the veloute from that; water or canned stock gives a thinner result.
- The birdA 4 to 5 lb roasting chicken suits this best. A stewing hen has more flavor but needs closer to two hours and will not carve as neatly.
- Yield and serviceServes four to six. Rice or steamed potatoes suit it, and the sauce wants something to go with it; there is a lot of it.
Poulette is one of the small white sauces of the classical French repertoire — a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, cream, lemon and parsley — and its name is often said to mean "pullet," a traditional derivation pointing to chicken stock, though the sauce is routinely used on tripe and mussels with no chicken stock at all. It turns up in Escoffier-era kitchens on mussels, tripe, sweetbreads and, as here, on boiled fowl. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, recorded the house's working repertoire in his book, which is why the entry can dispose of the sauce in five words and spend its detail on the garnish. Poached chicken under a pale, lemony sauce was the sort of thing ordered by diners who wanted French cooking without anything assertive on the plate.