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Braised Fillets of Chicken
Cut off some fillets of chicken and with a larding-needle lard each of them with four strips of pork; put a slice of fat pork for each fillet on the bottom of a braising pan and on top of the pork, a little piece of onion; sprinkle the fillets over with salt, pepper and flour, place them on the top of the pork and onion, pour in two pints of stock, cover over the pan and cook for an hour or so, basting frequently. A little more water or stock may be required if the other boils away, so that when it is completely done at the end of the hour there will be about one pint left in the pan; take out the fillets, drain them, cover with slightly warmed butter and dust them over with flour again; then place them on a gridiron over the fire and broil them until they are a light brown color. After the meat has been removed from the gravy, skim off the fat; put one tablespoonful of butter and one teaspoonful of flour into a saucepan and cook until of a light brown; then add it to the gravy, and boil up again. Place the fillets on a dish, and pour the sauce around them, or put them on a heap of mashed potatoes, with a little parsley at the edge and the sauce poured around.
A French-service treatment of chicken breast: larded, braised in stock, then glazed under heat and served with the reduced pan gravy. The one thing to change is the timing.
- An hour is far too longSkinless chicken breast is done at 165F internal, which takes roughly 20-25 minutes in a covered pan of simmering stock. Held for an hour it turns dry and stringy no matter how often it is basted. Braise to temperature, then reduce the liquid separately if you want the pint of gravy the recipe expects.
- "Fillets of chicken"These are the boneless breast halves, with or without the small tenderloin attached. The recipe does not say how many to cut, only "some."
- Larding without a needleA larding needle draws strips of fat pork through lean meat to keep it moist. Lacking one, lay thin bacon or salt pork over each fillet and tie it on, which does most of the same work. The point is insulation and fat, not the decorative stripes.
- Fat pork and salt porkThe slices on the bottom of the pan are unsmoked fat back or salt pork. Salt pork should be blanched a minute or two first, or the gravy will be too salty once reduced. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the nearest supermarket substitute.
- Two pints of stockFour cups. The recipe expects this to cook down to about a pint, topping up if it reduces too fast; in a tightly covered modern pan reduction may be slower, in which case finish the sauce uncovered.
- Braising panAny heavy lidded pan wide enough to hold the fillets in one layer -- a sauté pan with a lid or a shallow Dutch oven. The recipe cooks it covered on the stovetop over low heat.
- Gridiron over the fireA grill grate set over coals. Use the broiler at high heat, a few inches from the element, for two to three minutes a side -- long enough to color the buttered, floured surface and no longer, since the meat is already cooked.
- The thickeningOne tablespoon butter cooked with one teaspoon flour to a light brown is a small blond roux. Whisk the skimmed, hot gravy into it rather than the reverse, and boil a minute to lose any raw flour taste.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working record of a large hotel kitchen built on French practice. Larding is the signature of that practice: before poultry was bred for the plump, fast-growing breast of today, a chicken fillet was lean, small and prone to drying, so cooks threaded pork fat through it and laid more fat beneath it in the pan. The two-stage method here -- braise for tenderness, then a quick pass over live fire for color -- is the hotel answer to a problem of appearance, since braised meat comes out of the pot pale and unappetizing. The bed of mashed potato with a ring of sauce and a fringe of parsley is standard plating of the period, when a dish was expected to be built up on the platter rather than arranged flat.