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Chicken Legs in Papers
Take some cold cooked chickens and bone the legs. Mix some chopped parsley, pepper and salt with a little liquefied butter and dip the legs in it; put on each side of them a slice of cooked fat pork, wrap them in buttered paper, securing it at the edges and broil them over a clear fire, turning to cook both sides alike. When done dish them, pour over hot beef gravy, garnish with parsley, and serve.
Chicken Legs, Perigueux Cut off the legs from four chickens, bone them without cutting the skin, sprinkle over with salt and pepper, fill them with either cooked chicken forcemeat or quenelle forcemeat mixed with sweet herbs; put them in a saucepan with a little gravy mixed with white wine, place the pan on the fire, and boil gently. Take them out when done and lay them between two boards with a weight on top; when perfectly cold, trim and arrange in a flat saucepan, adding a little of the stock in which they were cooked reduced to half glaze; place the pan over a very slow fire and warm thoroughly. Take them out and place a paper frill on the small end of each and put them on a dish in a circle. Add four or five peeled and chopped raw truffles to the liquor, one wineglassful of Madeira and a little boiling brown sauce, and, after standing it on the fire a few minutes, pour it all over the stuffed legs, and serve.
Two recipes have been run together here: a simple broiled boned leg in buttered paper, and the more elaborate stuffed leg in truffled Madeira sauce. Both assume a kitchen that has cold roast chicken and a pot of brown stock standing ready.
- Boning the legsThe hinge of both recipes is removing the thigh and drumstick bones while leaving the skin intact, so the leg can be rolled or stuffed and holds its shape. Work from the inside with a small sharp knife, scraping rather than cutting; chilled legs are far easier than warm ones.
- Buttered paper, not foilParchment is the modern equivalent of the buttered paper. Fold the edges over on themselves in a tight crimp; the point is to trap steam and butter, and foil over direct heat will scorch the meat instead of steaming it.
- "A clear fire"That means charcoal or wood burnt down past the flame stage, so the paper does not ignite. A gas grill on medium or a broiler with the rack lowered to about six inches gives the same steady radiant heat; the chicken is already cooked and only needs heating through, so judge it by the paper browning and the meat being hot rather than by a fixed time.
- Cooked fat porkUsually taken to mean salt pork or unsmoked fatback, sliced thin. If you use salt pork, simmer it five minutes first to draw out excess salt, or the seasoned butter plus the pork will overwhelm the chicken. Blanched pancetta, or sheet caul fat, will serve the same wrapping purpose.
- Quenelle forcemeatThe recipe leaves the composition open. Modern practice is a fine paste of raw chicken breast pounded or processed with egg white and cream, seasoned and pushed through a sieve, everything kept ice-cold so the mixture does not break; something on the order of 8 oz of breast to 1 egg white and 4 fl oz cream should fill four legs.
- Pressing under weightThe boards and weight are there to compact the stuffed legs so they slice cleanly and reheat evenly. A sheet pan with cans on top, overnight in the refrigerator, does the job. Do not skip the chilling step; warm stuffed legs will not trim neatly.
- Half glaze and brown sauceReduce the poaching liquid until it coats a spoon, then finish with the Madeira and a well-made brown sauce or reduced veal stock. A wineglassful is roughly 2 fl oz. Raw truffles are a luxury item now; a small tin of truffle peelings with their juice is the practical substitute, added off the heat.
- ReheatingBoth dishes reheat already-cooked poultry, so bring the meat to at least 165F/74C at the center rather than merely warming the surface. The "very slow fire" of the second recipe is the lowest setting on a burner, with the pan on the heat rather than in an oven.
- Yield and servingFour legs serve four as a first course or two as a main. The Périgueux version is a plated dish arranged in a ring; the paper frills at the drumstick end are decorative and can be omitted without loss.
Oscar Tschirky, who was never actually a cook but ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, compiled his 1896 Cook Book from the grand French repertoire that any American hotel kitchen of the period was expected to reproduce. Both of these are exercises in thrift dressed as luxury: the first uses up cold roast chicken, and the second turns the cheap dark meat into a formal entree by boning, stuffing and glazing it. Perigueux refers to the town in the Perigord, the center of the French black truffle trade, and in classical cookery the name signals a Madeira-fortified brown sauce with chopped truffle. Cooking in buttered paper -- en papillote -- was standard hotel practice long before parchment was sold in rolls, and the paper frill on the bone end is often said to be a survival of a nineteenth-century table convention allowing a guest to pick the leg up without soiling the fingers, though the explanation is traditional rather than documented.