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Fricassee of Prairie Chicken
After thoroughly cleaning and singeing the bird, cut it up at the joints and flatten them a little with a cutlet bat; put the pieces of the bird into a saucepan with an onion stuck with a couple of cloves and a bunch composed of one or two small sprigs of thyme, parsley and bay leaf, pour in enough broth to cover, and place the pan over the fire until the liquor boils, then remove it to one side and let it simmer until the bird has become tender. Place two ounces of butter in a stewpan with a tablespoonful of flour, stir over the fire until melted, then pour in the cooking liquor of the bird, passing it through a strainer, and season to taste with salt and pepper, and continue stirring over the fire until it boils again; put a few sliced mushrooms in the liquor and boil a few minutes longer, then put in the pieces of the bird. Stir the beaten yolk of one egg into the fricassee and turn it onto a hot dish, serving immediately.
A classic white fricassee: the bird is poached, the poaching liquor becomes the sauce, and the sauce is finished off the heat with egg yolk. Oscar assumes a cook who knows all three moves, so the critical points go unstated.
- The hinge: the yolk must not boilStir the beaten yolk in with the pan off the heat, once the sauce has stopped bubbling. If the sauce returns to a boil after the yolk goes in, it will curdle into grainy threads and cannot be brought back.
- The birdPrairie chicken (greater prairie chicken) is scarce today and protected across much of its former range; a few states still allow a limited season under permit. It is not a market bird — commercial sale of wild-shot game is barred. A 3 lb free-range chicken, two pheasant, or four quail all take this treatment; guinea fowl is usually suggested as the nearest in flavor.
- Cutlet batA flat, heavy metal or wooden mallet used to flatten pieces to even thickness. The flat side of a cleaver or a small skillet does the same job — the point is even cooking, not tenderizing.
- "Remove it to one side"On a coal range this meant sliding the pan to a cooler part of the top. On a modern burner, bring to a boil then drop to the lowest setting so the surface barely trembles. A rolling boil will make the meat stringy. Reckon 35-45 minutes for chicken, longer for older game birds.
- Broth and roux proportionsExpect roughly 3-4 cups of broth to cover a cut-up bird. Two ounces of butter (4 tablespoons) to one tablespoon of flour is very little flour for that volume — the sauce will be thin by design, thickened mainly by reduction and the yolk. If you want it to coat, reduce the strained liquor by a third before whisking it into the roux, or raise the flour to three tablespoons.
- MushroomsCultivated white or cremini, thinly sliced, will cook through in the "few minutes" given. They shed water into the sauce, so taste and adjust the salt after they go in.
- SingeingThis removed the hair-fine pinfeathers left after plucking, done over a flame or a burning twist of paper. Supermarket birds need none of it; a pair of tweezers handles whatever the processor missed.
- Yield and servingOne bird serves two to three. Rice, boiled potatoes, or plain toast points are the period accompaniment; the sauce is the dish, so give it something to sit on.
Prairie chicken appeared on American hotel menus through the late nineteenth century as a market game bird, shipped east by rail in barrels from the grasslands of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas and the Dakotas, and the Waldorf-Astoria of Oscar Tschirky's era is likely to have served it, though the practice is not documented as routine. The market-hunting that supplied those menus, together with the plowing of the tallgrass prairie, drove the birds into steep decline; the eastern subspecies, the heath hen, was gone by 1932, and the Lacey Act of 1900 together with state laws banning the sale of game ended commercial trade in wild game generally. The recipe itself is straight French technique a fricass e blanc, in which the meat is never browned and the sauce is bound at the last moment with a liaison of egg yolk the kind of European framework Oscar's kitchen routinely applied to whatever the American market sent it.