Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Curried Chicken
Curried Chicken
Singe and draw a chicken weighing about three pounds and cut the flesh into square pieces; put these in cold water for five minutes, wash them well, drain and put them in a saucepan filling it up to the surface with hot water; season with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. Add a bunch of sweet herbs and six small onions and cook on a moderate fire for forty-five minutes, skimming well. Take another saucepan, place in it a gill and a half of white roux, moisten it with all of the broth from the chicken, and mix well together. Prepare a tablespoonful of diluted curry with the yolks of four eggs and the juice of half a lemon, beat all well together and pour it into the sauce a little at a time, stirring continually and not allowing it to boil. Pour the sauce over the chicken which remains in the saucepan, dress immediately on a hot dish, garnish with boiled rice, and serve.
Curried Chicken, Creole Style (Prepare and cook the same as Curried Chicken) adding one green pepper cut very fine, one chopped onion and half a clove of garlic; cook for twenty minutes with the chicken.
Curried Chicken, Spanish Style Prepare the same as for curried chicken, adding two tomatoes cut up and one green pepper; cook for ten minutes with the chicken.
A hotel-style fricassee finished with an egg-yolk liaison rather than a long-simmered curry sauce. The whole dish stands or falls on the last step.
- Never let the sauce boilOnce the yolks, lemon juice and curry go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or the eggs scramble and the sauce breaks. Hold it around 170-180F, off direct heat if need be, and stir constantly.
- A gill and a half of rouxA gill is half a cup, so this is about 3/4 cup of white roux — roughly 6 tablespoons butter cooked with 6 tablespoons flour without letting it color.
- "Diluted curry"Curry powder slaked with a little of the hot broth or water to a smooth paste, so it disperses instead of clumping. A tablespoon is modest by current taste.
- Singe and drawInstructions for a bird still carrying pinfeathers and innards. Buy a 3 lb chicken cut into serving pieces; the five-minute cold-water soak and washing were probably meant to draw blood out for a pale sauce and can be skipped.
- A bunch of sweet herbsA bouquet garni — parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, or bundled in cheesecloth so it lifts out cleanly before the sauce is made.
- Moderate fire, and skimmingOn the stovetop this means a gentle simmer, not a rolling boil, for the full 45 minutes. Skim the gray foam off in the first ten minutes or it will cloud the broth the sauce depends on.
- Broth quantity"Filling it up to the surface with hot water" gives more liquid than the roux can carry. Reduce the strained broth to about 3 cups before whisking it into the roux, or the sauce will be thin.
- YieldFour servings with rice. The Creole and Spanish variants add their vegetables to the simmering chicken near the end of cooking, not to the finished sauce.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a vast compendium that reads less like a home manual than a working index of what a large American hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand. Curry entered that repertoire by way of British and Anglo-Indian cooking, arriving in the United States as a commercially blended powder rather than a spice paste ground fresh; American and English cookbooks of the period treat it as a single seasoning to be stirred into an otherwise French sauce, which is exactly what happens here — a white roux and an egg-yolk-and-lemon liaison, the classic sauce poulette, with curry powder added. The Creole and Spanish variants, with their green pepper, garlic and tomato, show the same habit applied in the other direction: one base preparation renamed by whatever was thrown in at the end, a system that let a hotel list dozens of dishes off a handful of techniques.