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Fried Chicken Fillets with Mushrooms
Take half a pound of white mushrooms, peel and turn, put their trimmings into a stewpan, and the mushrooms into a fryingpan with half a teacupful of water, a small piece of butter and a little salt. Boil the mushrooms for three or four minutes, then strain their liquor into the stewpan with the trimmings, add one pint of bechamel sauce, and boil it until rather thickly reduced; then pass it through a fine hair sieve, return it to the stewpan, put in the mushrooms, one teaspoonful of sugar, mix half a teacupful of milk, and boil it up again. Trim the fillets of a fowl, put them in a fryingpan with a lump of butter, and fry them over a moderate fire. When cooked the fillets should be quite white. Serve on a hot dish with the mushrooms in the center.
A plain white-cooked chicken breast with a mushroom cream — the whole point is that nothing browns. Heat control is the entire recipe.
- Keep it white"Moderate fire" here means low enough that the butter never colours: foaming, not sizzling hard. Cook the fillets gently, covered if you like, turning once, and take them to 165F internally — pale is the aesthetic, not an excuse to undercook.
- Fillets of a fowlThese are the breast portions from a chicken, the tenderloin usually taken with them; the recipe does not mention skin, but nothing is to brown, so skinless is the safer reading. A single bird gives two, which serves two people; a pint of sauce is generous for that, so scale the sauce down or plan on four fillets.
- Peel and turnTurning is the old knife work of paring a mushroom cap into shallow spiral flutes. It is decorative only. Modern cultivated mushrooms need no peeling — wipe them, trim the stem ends, and keep the trimmings for the sauce as directed.
- TeacupfulPeriod sources vary; a teacupful is usually reckoned somewhere between about 4 and 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful is somewhere around 1/4 cup. Both uses here are approximate anyway: enough water to steam the mushrooms, enough milk to loosen the reduced sauce.
- BechamelOne pint is 2 cups. The recipe assumes it is already made, as a professional kitchen would; make a white roux with 2 tbsp each butter and flour, whisk in 2 cups warm milk, and simmer it out so no raw flour taste remains before it goes near the mushroom liquor.
- Hair sieveA sieve woven with horsehair, common in kitchens of the period. A fine-mesh conical strainer or a chinois does the same job; press the mushroom trimmings against the mesh to get their flavour and discard the pulp.
- The teaspoon of sugarNot a sweetener but a corrective, rounding the sauce after reduction. Add it at the end, taste, and hold back if your bechamel is already mild.
- ServingArrange the fillets around the rim of a warmed platter with the mushrooms and sauce mounded in the middle. The sauce skins fast, so plate at the last minute.
Oscar Tschirky's book is generally taken to reflect the Waldorf's kitchen around 1896, which means it records classic French service under American names: filets de volaille and a mushroom bechamel, listed in English for a hotel clientele. The technique of cooking poultry breast in butter without colour — à blanc — was a mark of a serious kitchen, since it required steady low heat from a coal range and a cook who watched it. The doubled use of the mushrooms, caps for the dish and trimmings for the sauce, is standard escoffier-era economy: nothing edible left the larder unextracted. Sugar in a savoury white sauce, which reads oddly now, is often said to have been a feature of late nineteenth-century professional practice, a balance against long-reduced dairy.