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Chicken Sauted
The Dubois method of preparing this dish is as follows: Put into a stewpan some peeled truffles with a wineglassful of wine and a little salt, place the pan on the fire and boil, but do not do so until just previous to using them. Put an equal quantity of mushrooms in a saucepan and boil them, adding a little butter and the juice of a lemon. Take a couple of fat chickens, singe, draw and cut off the pinions and claws, and remove the legs. Cut the breast up so as to have two fillets and a breast part. Chop the bones of the body in halves and break the thick bones of the leg with a knife and take them out. Place the legs in a sautepan with a little butter, arrange them at the bottom, then put the neck, pinions and bones from the body, season them with salt and pepper and place the pan on the fire so that they will fry slowly. When they are about half cooked put in the fillets and breast parts, also a little parsley, sweet herbs and a clove of garlic; when the meat is set remove it from the pan with a skimmer, put it into another sautepan and stir in the truffles; remove the fat from the first sautepan, put in the truffle trimmings and a wine-glassful of white wine, boil for a few minutes and then add twice its bulk of brown sauce and the liquor in which the truffles were cooked. Boil this sauce quickly for ten minutes or so; remove the fat and pass it through a fine sieve onto the chicken meat. Warm the meat, taking care not to let the sauce boil again. Put in the center of a dish a croustade of fried bread, place the pinions and bones from the body around it; then place the fillets and legs around that again, and the parts of the breast on top. Garnish the base with some truffles and mushrooms, put a few cockscombs here and there, remove the fat from the sauce, and serve the meat with the sauce poured over. Chicken Saute, Bordelaise Style Take two chickens, singe and draw, cut them into twelve pieces each and put them into a sautepan with two tablespoonfuls of oil and one chopped shallot, and let brown well for five minutes; then moisten with half a wineglassful of white wine, adding three artichoke bottoms, each one cut into four pieces; season with salt and pepper, put on the lid and simmer slowly for fifteen minutes. Add a teaspoonful of meat glaze when about to serve, and also the juice of half a lemon and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Dish up the pieces, decorate with paper ruffles and garnish with the artichoke bottoms in clusters and twelve cooked potatoes.
Chicken Sauted, Hungarian Style Take two fowls, singe and draw. Cut them into twelve pieces and put them into a sautepan with one ounce of clarified butter, adding one finely-chopped onion and a seasoning of salt and pepper. Cook slowly without browning for five minutes on each side, then moisten with half a pint of bechamel sauce and half a breakfast cupful of cream and cook again for twenty minutes. Serve, after first skimming off the fat, with six croutons of fried bread for a garnish. Chicken Sauted, Marengo Singe two fowls, draw and cut them into six pieces each, lay them in an oiled stewpan and brown slightly on both sides for five minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper; when of a golden color moisten with a half pint of Spanish sauce and half a breakfast cupful of mushroom liquor; add twelve button mushrooms and two truffles cut in thin slices, also half a wineglassful of Madeira wine, cook for twenty minutes, and serve with six fried eggs and six croutons of fried bread. Put paper ruffles on the ends of the wings and legs of the chickens, and serve with the eggs and bread around the edge.
Four sautés in one entry: the Dubois version, then Bordelaise, Hungarian and Marengo. All four are built on the same skeleton — a chicken jointed raw, cooked in fat in a shallow pan, then finished with a sauce made in the same pan or brought to it.
- The hinge: the sauce must not boil once the chicken is back in itDubois is explicit — warm the meat, do not let the sauce boil again. Reboiling the strained brown sauce over the cooked breast squeezes it dry and turns the truffle flavour flat. Bring the sauce to serving heat off a low flame only.
- Wineglassful and breakfast cupfulThe book does not define either. By the usual period convention a wineglassful is about 2 fl oz, roughly 4 tablespoons, so half a wineglassful is about 2 tablespoons; a breakfast cup was larger than a teacup, on the order of 8 to 10 fl oz — a full modern cup is close enough.
- "Fat chickens" and "fowls" are not the same birdIn period usage a chicken was a young tender bird and a fowl an older hen that generally needed longer, moister cooking. The recipe gives no weights. Note that the twenty-minute timings for the Hungarian and Marengo versions are short for an older bird; a tender young chicken suits them better.
- Brown sauce and Spanish sauceBoth mean espagnole — a brown roux sauce built on veal or beef stock, made in advance in a professional kitchen. A well-reduced brown chicken or veal stock, lightly thickened, stands in for it. Meat glaze is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup; a teaspoon of it is a seasoning, not a sauce.
- Cutting into twelve piecesThe recipe does not say how the twelve pieces are divided; a plausible division is the two drumsticks, two thighs and two wings with each breast cut across into three. Separately, in the Dubois version the thick leg bones are broken and taken out before cooking.
- Cockscombs and trufflesCockscombs were a standard garnish of the grande cuisine and are effectively unobtainable now; leave them out rather than substitute. Fresh truffles simmered in wine can be replaced by good preserved truffle with its juice, added at the end — the recipe's own instruction not to cook them until just before serving is sound advice for either.
- Artichoke bottomsFor the Bordelaise, trimmed fresh artichoke bottoms cooked in acidulated water, or good tinned or frozen hearts. The recipe does not say whether they go in raw or pre-cooked; pre-cooked ones need only the last few minutes of the fifteen.
- The Hungarian version has no paprikaBéchamel, cream and onion, no browning and no spice, despite paprika being usual in other period "Hongroise" preparations. Taken as written, this is a white, creamed dish; adding paprika makes it a different recipe.
- Yield and paper rufflesEach version serves six to eight. The paper ruffles (papillotes) slipped over the cut bone ends are pure period presentation and can be skipped without loss.
The named authority is Urbain Dubois, the French chef whose La Cuisine Classique and later volumes codified the elaborate service à la russe of the mid-nineteenth century, and whose recipes were still a working reference for hotel kitchens when Oscar Tschirky assembled this book at the Waldorf in the 1890s. The four sautés show how such a repertoire was organised: one technique, then a list of finishes named for a place, a nation or an occasion. Marengo is traditionally traced to a dish improvised for Napoleon after the battle of that name in 1800, with the fried egg and croutons preserved as evidence of a field kitchen making do — the story is widely repeated but should be treated as tradition rather than record. Bordelaise here means shallot, white wine and artichoke rather than the red-wine-and-marrow sauce the word usually signals today, a reminder that these garnish names were house conventions as much as fixed formulas.