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Chicken Fillets with Asparagus
Take two fat birds and cut them up so that the breast and breast-bone will be one piece and the back and legs another. Put the back parts into a saucepan with one gallon of water, and, when it boils, add the breasts. When these have boiled for an hour or so and are quite tender, take them out and let them cool. Put a few vegetables in the liquor and boil fast until it is reduced to one-half its original bulk; then strain it through a cloth into another saucepan and add two tablespoonfuls of each of butter and flour previously worked together in a pan over the fire, to thicken it, and place the pan on the side of the fire where its contents will simmer gently. Skim frequently, and when the liquor is reduced to one quart pour in a small quantity of mushroom liquor, prepared by boiling button mushrooms in stock. Reduce again, and when it is less than one quart and getting thick add one tablespoonful of butter, a little lemon juice, salt and cayenne. Have in the meantime one breakfast cupful of cream boiling, add it to the liquor in the other pan a little at a time to make it the required consistence and then pass all through a strainer. Cut the meat away from the breastbone and trim it into shape, plunge the pieces into boiling chicken broth to get thoroughly warmed through, place them on a dish and pour the sauce over them. Cut from the stalks some asparagus heads, boil them in salted water like peas, drain, shake in a pan with melted butter, and place on the dish with the fillets. Chicken Fillets, with Mushroom Puree Roast three chickens, having them not quite done. Remove them from the spit, let them get cold and then lift off the fillets from the backs, also the legs and the breasts, trimming and taking off all the skin. Put three teacupfuls of yellow sauce into a pan with a teacupful and a half of aspic jelly, both slightly warmed. Place the pan on the ice and stir until moderately thick; then remove the pan from the ice, dip the pieces of fowl singly into the sauce, covering them entirely, and arrange them side by side on a baking sheet. Fill a border mould with cooked rice, let it set, turn it out onto a dish, fill the center with a puree of mushroom, heaping it up. Arrange the fillets around on top of the border.
Two dishes are run together here, as often happens in Oscar's book: a hot poached-breast dish with a reduced velouté, and a cold chaud-froid. The first is sound period technique; the second directs you to roast chicken deliberately underdone and then serve it cold, which is the reason for the caution above.
- Why the second dish fails"Roast three chickens, having them not quite done," then cool them, coat them in sauce and serve — the poultry never reaches a safe internal temperature and then sits at room temperature while the coating sets. Deliberately undercooked chicken held cold is a salmonella and campylobacter risk that no amount of chilled sauce corrects. If you want a chaud-froid of chicken, work from a current recipe that cooks the birds through.
- The hinge of the first dishEverything depends on the reduction. A gallon of water is taken to a half gallon, thickened, skimmed repeatedly down to a quart, then reduced again with mushroom liquor before the cream goes in. Rushing it at a hard boil clouds the sauce and dulls it; the "side of the fire" means the coolest part of the range, i.e. a bare simmer.
- Two fat birdsTwo whole chickens; the recipe gives no weight. The backs and legs go into the water first and the breasts follow, and only the breast meat is served, so it yields four fillets.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cupful is usually taken as about 8 fl oz, close to a modern cup. A teacupful is smaller, commonly reckoned at 4 to 6 fl oz, though the sizes were never standardised. Three teacupfuls of yellow sauce is therefore nearer two cups than three.
- Butter and flour "worked together over the fire"This is a cooked blond roux, not a raw beurre manié: equal parts butter and flour stirred in a pan until it smells nutty but takes no colour. Two tablespoons of each will thicken a half gallon only lightly, which is the point — the body comes from reduction.
- Mushroom liquorSimmer button mushrooms in a little stock and strain; the liquid is what you want. Modern cooks can use the soaking liquid from dried mushrooms, but it is far stronger, so add it by the spoonful.
- "Yellow sauce" and aspicYellow sauce is best read as a vélouté-type sauce, blond roux with white stock, sometimes enriched with egg yolk. Aspic jelly here is a clarified, well-gelled chicken stock, the setting agent for a chaud-froid coating.
- Asparagus"Boil them in salted water like peas." No time is given, and period vegetable cookery generally ran longer than ours. Cut tips need two to four minutes in salted water, until just yielding, then drained and rolled in butter off the heat.
- Border mouldA ring mould. Packed cooked rice will unmould cleanly if it is still warm and slightly sticky, and if the mould is lightly buttered.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maître d'hôtel when it opened in 1893 and put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a nine-hundred-page compendium aimed at both hotel kitchens and ambitious households. Dishes like this one show the French repertoire as it was practised in American grand hotels: a chicken velouté built from scratch out of the carcasses, breasts trimmed into neat fillets, and a garnish of asparagus tips, which in the 1890s was an expensive spring luxury and a deliberate signal of a costly plate. The second dish is a chaud-froid, the cold-buffet technique in which cooked poultry is masked in a sauce set with aspic and arranged on a rice or forcemeat border — the mainstay of the hotel cold table, where food had to look composed under lights for hours. Both are food designed to be carried to a table by a waiter, which is why the instructions dwell so much on trimming and arrangement and so little on the clock.