Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Supreme of Chickens
Supreme of Chickens
Cut into slices a quarter of an inch thick the meat off the breasts of three fowls; trim them to one size and to the shape of pears; lay them in a tin dish with plenty of butter, dust them over with salt, cover them with a sheet of buttered paper and put them by until just before they are wanted, when they must be put in the oven and baked. Cut some slices of dressed tongue the same shape but a little smaller than the cutlets, and warm them in the same manner but without using so much butter. Cut up the remains of the chickens into pieces, put them in a stewpan with slices of ham and bacon, trimmings of veal and half a calf's foot; add vegetables such as onions, carrots and thyme, celery, mushrooms, parsley, marjoram, a bay leaf and a few trimmings of truffles. Season to taste with pepper, salt, mace and cloves, fill up the saucepan with cold water, put on the lid and simmer gently for three or four hours. Strain the liquor through a fine hair sieve, leave it until cool and then skim off all the fat. Put two ounces of butter into a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of flour, stir it over the fire until well mixed and then pour in gradually the above liquor. Stir it over the fire until very hot, but do not allow it to boil, then move to the side. Take a small canful each of mushrooms, truffles and cockscombs and heat them by standing the cans in hot water. Pour some of the above liquor onto a hot deep dish, pile the cockscombs, mushrooms and truffles in the center. Arrange the pieces of fowl and tongue around, and serve.
A classic hotel dish in three parts: baked breast fillets, a long-simmered brown-white stock built from the carcasses, and a garnish out of tins. Nothing here is difficult, but the sequence assumes a brigade, so read it through and stage the work.
- What a supreme isThe boneless, skinless breast fillet. Three fowls give six breasts; sliced a quarter inch thick and trimmed to matching teardrops, they yield a plateful of small cutlets, though the recipe never states how many it serves.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given; the book assumes a range the cook knows. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it, and quarter-inch slices need only 8 to 12 minutes and go dry past that. The buttered paper is a covering sheet, greased so it will not stick.
- Dressed tongueMeans tongue already cooked and prepared, cooled and skinned, ready to slice. Cured beef tongue from a delicatessen or good butcher is the closest thing now; it needs only warming, not cooking.
- The calf's footIt is there for gelatin and body, not flavor. A split veal knuckle, a pig's foot, or a few ounces of veal shank will do the same. The ham, bacon and veal trimmings supply the savor; without some of them the sauce is thin.
- Do not let the sauce boilThis is the hinge. The roux is loosened with the strained stock and brought up hot only, because a boiled veal velout hroits loses gloss. The recipe gives no measure for the liquor: add it gradually until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Straining and skimmingA fine hair sieve is a chinois or a doubled square of muslin. Chilling the strained liquor and lifting the fat cap is worth the wait; skimming warm stock leaves the sauce greasy.
- CockscombsBlanched, peeled rooster combs, sold canned as a formal garnish and now hard to find outside specialty suppliers. Omit them if need be. Canned truffle trimmings can be replaced with a small jar of truffle peelings or left out; the mushrooms are better fresh, sauteed in butter.
- CanfulsThe recipe says only "a small canful" of each and gives no weight. Judge by the plate: the garnish is a mound in the center, not a stew.
- ServingA wide, deep, thoroughly hot platter matters more than usual, since the sauce is poured first and the sliced meat set around the rim. Cold china dulls the sauce within a minute.
The dish belongs to the language of the late nineteenth-century grand hotel, where French kitchen terms were used on American menus without translation: supreme for the trimmed breast fillet, and a garnish of cockscombs, truffles and mushrooms that in classical practice went by names like a la financiere or Toulouse. Cutting the fillets "to the shape of pears" and matching each with a slightly smaller round of tongue is pure service-kitchen thinking: identical portions, arranged around a mound of garnish, plated for a dining room where every guest at the table received the same silhouette. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and the recipe shows the economy behind the luxury, since the carcasses, ham ends and veal trimmings become the sauce that dresses the expensive part. The canned cockscombs are the period detail most likely to stop a modern reader; they were then a standard commercial item, and their disappearance from grocers' shelves is a fair measure of how much formal garnishing has narrowed since.