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Chicken Sauted with Tarragon
Take a raw chicken and cut into small pieces and season with salt and pepper. Have a small bunch of tarragon and pick off the leaves; put the stalks in a saucepan with half a pint of clear gravy and boil for twenty minutes; blanch the leaves. Put into a sautepan some olive oil and when boiling add the pieces of chicken and toss them about until cooked and browned. Strain the gravy from the tarragon stalks and mix the leaves with it. Place the pieces of chicken on a hot dish, pour the gravy over, and serve right away. Care should be taken to drain the oil off the meat as much as possible.
A French sauté in the plainest possible dress: the sauce is nothing but stock infused with tarragon stalks, so the quality of that stock decides the dish.
- The hinge: two tarragonsOnly French tarragon has the anise perfume this dish is built on. Russian tarragon, which is what many garden centres sell, is coarse and nearly flavourless and will leave the sauce blank.
- "Clear gravy"Not gravy in the modern sense but a clear brown stock or jus — veal or chicken bones roasted and simmered, strained bright. A good unsalted chicken stock, reduced by a third to concentrate it, is the practical substitute.
- Half a pint"Half a pint" -- An American half pint is one cup (8 fl oz). Twenty minutes of boiling with the stalks will reduce it somewhat, though the recipe sets no target volume; watch it so you are not left with too little sauce.
- Cutting the bird"Small pieces" means jointed for sautéing: a 3 to 3½ lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces, bone in. Boneless pieces cook faster and give a thinner-flavoured pan.
- Blanching the leavesThirty seconds in boiling water, then cold water, sets the green and takes the harsh edge off. Add them to the strained stock off the heat — long cooking turns tarragon bitter and grey.
- Oil temperature and doneness"When boiling" means hot enough to shimmer; the book gives no temperature. Brown the pieces well, then lower the heat; dark meat wants 20 to 25 minutes, breast pieces 15 or so. Cook to 165F in the thickest part, not touching the bone.
- Draining the oilThe instruction matters because there is no butter or cream to bind the sauce. Any oil clinging to the chicken will float on the stock and make it look broken. Blot the pieces before plating.
- YieldOne chicken and a cup of sauce serves three, or four at a table with several courses.
This is poulet sauté à l'estragon, a standard of the professional French repertoire that Oscar Tschirky — never a cook himself, but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel and the man whose name sold the book in 1896 — set down in the English kitchen-French of his day. The phrase "clear gravy" is a period translation of jus, the kind of brown stock that a hotel brigade kept going constantly and that a home cook has to build deliberately. Tarragon is closely associated with the classical French kitchen, and this treatment — stalks simmered for their perfume and discarded, leaves blanched and returned at the last moment — is the orthodox way of getting both depth and freshness from it. The Waldorf opened in 1893 and its kitchen was French in method and staffing; recipes like this one show how directly Parisian technique arrived on Fifth Avenue.