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Fried Chicken
Take a chicken, pluck, singe and wipe it with a wet towel, and cut in joints. Put into a fryingpan one pint of cream and place it over a moderate fire until it begins to color, then put in the chicken and fry until the underside is of a light brown. Take out a part of the cream, turn the chicken over, season with pepper, and finish cooking it. Put it on a hot dish when done, and pour the cream which was taken out back into the fryingpan, stir it well with what remains in the pan, let it boil once, and serve it with the chicken sprinkled with salt. A small chicken may be breaded, either whole or in quarters, and fried brown in smoking fat.
Fried Chicken, Marengo Style Cut up a chicken and trim the pieces. Put plenty of oil in a stewpan with a minced clove of garlic and a small bundle of sweet herbs; when boiling put in the pieces of fowl, season with salt and pepper and fry them. When cooked strain nearly one teacupful of oil from the saucepan into a small stewpan; mix with it a moderate quantity each of finely-chopped mushrooms, shallots and parsley, and one wine-glassful of white wine and sufficient clear stock, freed from fat, to make the sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and boil the sauce for about a quarter of an hour, Pile the piece of fowl on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, garnish with croutons of bread fried brown in butter, and some button mushrooms, and serve.
Fried Chicken, Mercier Style Pluck a chicken, clean and truss as if for roasting, sprinkle it well with flour, plunge it into boiling fat to cover, and fry for fully twenty minutes. Take it out, drain and cut it into joints, cover them over separately with rich forcemeat beaten up with egg, and place them in the oven for a few minutes for the forcemeat to set. In the meantime whip the whites of two or three eggs to a stiff froth, color this with three colors, leaving a part white, decorate the forcemeat with these, place the pieces of fowl in the oven for a moment to set, and serve immediately.
Fried Chicken, Vanderbilt Style Prepare and clean a chicken, and commencing from the neck, remove the skin from the flesh all around, including the legs; then stuff it with veal and tongue forcemeat, taking care not to fill it too full, only over the wishbone, and to fill all the cavities, making it plump and round. Then truss it as if for roasting, plunge into boiling fat sufficient to cover it, and fry a golden brown. Serve hot with piquant sauce, or cold, with salad.
Four treatments of one bird, from a plain pan-fry in cream to the sort of decorated show piece the Waldorf sent out on silver. The first is the one worth cooking; the rest need reading with a modern eye.
- Frying in cream is not a mistakeA pint (2 cups) of heavy cream held over a moderate flame will lose its water and break down to butterfat, so the chicken ends up browning in what is effectively butter with milk solids. Use cream at 36 percent fat or higher; anything labelled light or half-and-half will curdle and thin instead of breaking cleanly.
- "Moderate fire" here means mediumKeep the pan at a steady medium so the cream reduces and colours without scorching the milk solids. Once the fat separates the chicken browns fast, so the second side needs watching.
- Reserving part of the creamThe point of taking some out is to keep a portion of unreduced cream in hand; poured back at the end it deglazes the browned solids into a sauce. Boil it once only, as directed, or it will tighten and grease out.
- Bird size and donenessA market chicken today is 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 lb and feeds four; the birds Oscar's kitchen used were often smaller. Cut in joints, dark meat wants 175F at the bone and breast 160-165F, which is longer than the recipe's brisk "finish cooking it" implies.
- Old measures in the MarengoA teacupful is variously given as 4 to 6 fl oz, a wine-glassful about 2 fl oz. "Plenty of oil in a stewpan" means enough to shallow-fry the pieces. A quarter hour of boiling is right for the sauce, not for the chicken.
- Salt at the endIn the plain version the chicken is seasoned with pepper during cooking and salted only when it reaches the dish; the Marengo, by contrast, is salted while frying and again in the sauce.
- The Mercier decorationWhipped raw egg white, tinted and piped over forcemeat, then "placed in the oven for a moment to set" is not cooked egg by any current standard. Skip the ornament; the forcemeat itself should reach 165F, which takes longer than the few minutes given.
- Frying a whole stuffed birdTwenty minutes in deep fat, or frying a bird packed with raw veal-and-tongue forcemeat until "golden brown," browns the outside long before the interior is safe. Check the centre of any forcemeat for 165F rather than trusting the colour.
- Plucking and singeingBoth steps are obsolete with a dressed supermarket bird. Singeing removed the last pinfeathers over a flame; a pair of tweezers does the same work now.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium of the hotel's repertoire, and the variant names here show how that repertoire worked: a dish was defined less by technique than by whose table it was carried to. "Marengo" is generally traced to the chicken said to have been improvised for Napoleon after the battle of Marengo in 1800, and by Oscar's day the name simply signalled garlic, oil, mushrooms and white wine rather than butter. "Vanderbilt style" and "Mercier style" belong to the hotel's own habit of attaching names to dishes in its menu language. The first recipe is the plainest of the four: chicken fried in cream until the cream breaks to fat.