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Stewed Chickens
Take two chickens, cut off the feet and beat the breast bones until flat, but without breaking the skin, and dredge them over with a little flour. Put a large lump of butter into a stewpan and make it hot, then put in the chickens and fry them until brown. Cut one pound of gravy beef and half a pound of beefsteak into thin slices, drain the butter out of the pan containing the fowls and cover them with the slices of beef; put in a few slices of carrot and onion, a bunch of sweet herbs, two or three cloves, a small piece of mace and a dust of pepper; pour over one quart of boiling water, cover the stewpan closely, and stew the contents for a quarter of an hour. Take out the chickens but continue boiling the meat until a rich brown gravy is formed. When the gravy is ready, strain it through a fine hair sieve, return it to the saucepan again with the chickens, add about a teaspoonful of red wine and keep it over a slow fire until the chickens are hot through again. If desired, a few mushrooms may be added, but they must be put in after the gravy is strained. Boil some thin slices of ham until slightly crisped. Put the chickens on a hot dish, pour the gravy around them. Serve garnished with the ham and sliced lemons.
Stewed Chickens, Cardinal Style Soak two chickens in a basin of cold water for about an hour; take them out and let them drain, then lift up the skin from the breasts and legs as much as possible without tearing it, and fill the cavity with forcemeat of fowl, colored with lobster spawn to a deep red; truss the fowls as if for boiling, cover them with thin layers of fat bacon, put them in a stewpan with some chopped vegetables, cover with stock and simmer gently. Care must be taken that they do not boil fast or the force will burst the skin of the fowl, and so look unsightly when served. Dish with an ornamental croustade of fried bread in the center of the dish, garnish with quenelles of fowls, both red and white, glazed truffles, cockscombs, crayfish tails and button mushrooms, and on each side of the croustade put a larded sweetbread. Serve with cardinal sauce and garnish with ornamental silver skewers set in the croustade. Stewed Chicken, Matelote Style Singe a fowl, draw and cut up in pieces, rub it with butter and flour and brown in an oven. Put four tablespoonfuls of butter in a fryingpan and in it fry a carrot, a parsnip and an onion all cut in slices. Place the fowl in a stewpan with the vegetables and one quart of white stock. In the butter in which the vegetables were fried brown two tablespoonfuls of flour, and stir this in with the fowl; mash the liver and add the chicken, with one tablespoonful of capers, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer slowly for three-quarters of an hour, add a quarter of a pound of mushrooms cut into small pieces, and simmer for a quarter of an hour longer. Serve garnished with mashed potatoes.
Stewed Chicken, Milanese Style Pluck, singe and draw a chicken, remove the bones and dust the inside with a little salt and pepper. Have a stuffing prepared in the meantime as follows: Chop the yolks of eight hard boiled eggs and mix them with six ounces of minced and pounded raw, lean ham and an ounce and a half of pork, and pass the mixture through a coarse sieve; add two shallots, one tablespoonful of parsley, a little thyme and bay leaf, all chopped fine and two ounces of breadcrumbs; make this into a paste with two eggs and add a dozen uncooked oysters. Sew the fowl up to prevent the stuffing from coming out, tie up in a well-buttered cloth, and put it in a saucepan with sufficient boiling stock to cover, and cook gently on the side of the fire for thirty minutes or so, according to the size of the bird. Take it out and when it is cool, remove the cloth, roll the chicken in flour, dip in beaten egg, cover with breadcrumbs, put in a saucepan with enough boiling fat to cover it and fry for about ten minutes. Serve garnished with fried parsley, with a little veloute sauce in a sauceboat.
Stewed Stuffed Chickens, Godard Clean and prepare two chickens, stuff them with forcemeat, truss, put them into a saucepan of white stock and boil until tender. Place in the center of a dish a croustade of fried bread, untruss the fowls and put one at each end of the dish, leaning against the croustade. Garnish with truffles, cockscombs and button mushrooms, glazing the truffles and washing the cockscombs and mushrooms with white sauce reduced with mushroom liquor. Put three skewers, decorated with truffles, mushrooms and cockscombs in the croustade, and serve. Stewed Chickens, Villeroy Take a couple of chickens, draw and singe; remove the breast-bones and stuff them with a mixture of butter, lemon juice (the juice of half a lemon will be enough), salt and pepper to taste; tie them up in shape with string and put into a saucepan of water. Pour a little marechale sauce into another pan; also three or four tablespoonfuls of tarragon vinegar; place this pan on a sharp fire and let the liquor reduce quickly to half its original bulk, then add six tablespoonfuls of veloute sauce, sprinkle a little salt and pepper over to taste; add the yolks of two eggs and mix thoroughly. In the meantime place some slices of lemon and bacon over the chickens in the saucepan and put a few slices around them, place the pan over a good fire and cook for half an hour, when the meat should be done. Lay the chickens on a dish, having previously removed the string and drained them, add a lump of butter to the sauce, work it well, pour it over them, and serve.
Six related preparations under one heading, ranging from a plain brown stew to full Carême-era table pieces. Read the first one for technique and the rest for garnish ideas; several assume a brigade with stock, forcemeat and four mother sauces already standing by.
- The timing is the real problemWhole chickens stewed a quarter of an hour and then merely reheated are not cooked. Work to doneness rather than the clock: a jointed or flattened bird needs roughly 35-50 minutes of gentle simmering, and the thickest part of the thigh should read 165F/74C. The beef and aromatics can keep reducing after the chicken comes out, exactly as written.
- Gravy beefShin or shank, cut across the bone, sold for stock and long stews. Its collagen is the whole point of the pound of it here; it is what makes the strained liquid glossy and rich. Chuck is an acceptable substitute, oxtail better.
- "A large lump of butter"Read as 3-4 tablespoons, enough to film a wide pan. It is drained off before the beef goes in, so it is a frying medium, not part of the sauce.
- A teaspoonful of red wineProbably not a slip for a larger measure: a spoonful here reads as a finishing seasoning for an already-reduced gravy, much as one would use a dash of sherry or Madeira. Add it at the end and taste before adding more.
- Mace, cloves, sweet herbsMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less resinous than the seed; a blade or a pinch of ground is plenty for a quart. "A bunch of sweet herbs" means a tied bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf, removed before straining. A fine hair sieve is a fine-mesh strainer, ideally lined with a damp cloth.
- Vanished garnishesCockscombs are effectively unobtainable retail, and lobster spawn (coral, used as the red colouring for the Cardinal forcemeat) only turns up if you buy a hen lobster. Larded sweetbreads and glazed truffles are orderable but expensive. Skip the cockscombs and use paprika or tomato paste for the red quenelles; the ornamental silver skewers were decoration rather than food.
- CroustadeHere a shaped block of bread fried in fat, used as a plinth to prop the birds against and hold the skewers. Its purpose was structural rather than culinary, and a modern cook can dish the chicken without it and lose nothing but the height.
- Sauces named, not givenVelouté is a light stock roux sauce; cardinal is a béchamel or velouté with fish stock, lobster butter and coral; marechale and Godard belong to the same nineteenth-century repertoire. None can be improvised from this page alone.
- Matelote wording"Mash the liver and add the chicken" should be read as adding the mashed liver to the pan with the chicken; it acts as a thickener along with the browned flour. Despite the name, there is no wine in this version, which is what usually defines a matelote.
- YieldTwo chickens with a pound and a half of beef in the gravy will serve six to eight. The Milanese boned-and-fried bird serves four.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf-Astoria, he was its maître d'hôtel, but his 1896 Cook Book collected the hotel's working repertoire and made his name a byword for New York luxury dining. This cluster of stewed chickens shows how completely that repertoire came out of French classical cookery: Cardinal, Godard, Villeroy and Matelote are all garnish and sauce names from the Carême-to-Escoffier tradition, where a dish was identified less by how the meat was cooked than by what surrounded it on the platter. The plain first recipe, with its pound of gravy beef sacrificed to make a gravy for two chickens, belongs to an older English tradition of stewing a bird in a meat broth rather than its own juices, and it assumes a kitchen where beef trimmings and stock were always at hand. The croustades, silver skewers and glazed truffles point to the elaborate presentation style of the period, when garnished set pieces were built up on the dish for display.