No. 1835

Chicken Fillets or Breasts a la Bodisko

Filets ou Ailes de Poulet a la Bodisko

Raise the large fillets from six two pound chickens; suppress the skin and split them in two through their thickness without detaching the parts; season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and fill up the opened space with cooked fine herbs (No. 385) mixed with quenelle forcemeat (No. 89). Break six egg-yolks in a dish, add two gills of melted butter and beat them together; dip the fillets into this and then roll them in bread-crumbs; lay them on a buttered baking pan, pour butter over and cook in a hot oven, then drain. Trim the pointed ends with favor frills (No. 10), and dress the fillets in a circle filling the center with cepes fried in butter, moistened with sour cream and reduced. Serve separately a well buttered white bordelaise sauce (No. 436), thickening it with egg-yolks and butter, straining it through a tammy.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stocked larder, and half of this recipe lives in cross-references to other numbered entries. Read it as an assembly job: stuffed, breaded breasts baked hot, with a mushroom garnish and a sauce sent to table separately.

Two gills of butterA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of melted butter beaten into six yolks. That is a very rich coating; half the quantity still binds crumbs to the meat perfectly well.
A hot ovenRanhofer gives no temperatures anywhere, so this is a judgement call: somewhere around 425F answers to "hot". The breasts are thin, stuffed and butter-soaked, and they want fast colour on the crumb before the meat dries. Pull them at 165F in the thickest part of the stuffing.
Six two-pound chickensThese are small birds by modern standards. Six birds give twelve large fillets; the recipe names no number of covers, but one fillet a head is the obvious reading. Two boneless breasts from a 4 lb supermarket bird, butterflied, will stand in for four of Ranhofer's fillets.
Split without detachingThe hinge of the dish. Butterfly each fillet through its thickness leaving one edge joined, so the forcemeat is enclosed rather than squeezing out in the oven. Press the edges together firmly before the egg dip.
The cross-referenced fillingsNo. 385 is fines herbes cooked down in butter with shallot and mushroom; No. 89 is a pounded quenelle forcemeat bound with egg and cream. Modern equivalent: a duxelles folded into a chicken or veal mousseline. Keep it stiff or it will run.
Cepes and sour creamCepes are porcini; dried and rehydrated work, or use cremini with a little of the soaking liquid. Reduce the sour cream gently and off a hard boil, full-fat only, or it will break.
Bordelaise blancheNo. 436 is the white bordelaise, a white-wine and shallot sauce, not the red-wine and marrow version the name suggests today. Thickening with yolks means holding it below a simmer once they go in.
Tammy and favor frillsA tammy is a fine woven cloth for straining; a chinois lined with muslin does the job. Favor frills are the paper cuffs of Victorian service and can simply be left off.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its habit of naming dishes for patrons, diplomats and public figures is a large part of what the book is. "A la Bodisko" is generally taken to honour Baron Alexander de Bodisco, the Russian minister to Washington from the late 1830s until his death in 1854, whose lavish entertaining and much-discussed marriage to a young American made him a fixture of mid-century society pages; the attribution is traditional rather than documented in the book itself. The construction is pure French restaurant practice of the period: a plain breast made into a composed dish by stuffing it with forcemeat, breading it, ringing it on the platter and filling the centre with a garnish, with the sauce passed separately so the crumb stays crisp. The cepes and sour cream point east, which is as close as the plate comes to explaining its Russian name.