No. 1836

Chicken Fillets or Breasts a la Certosa

Filets ou Ailes de Poulet a la Certosa

Clean well six good fleshy chickens; raise the fillets covered with their skin and saute them in butter. Prepare a fine Julienne (No. 318) with the red part of carrots blanched in an abundance of water, drained and fried in butter with mushrooms, cut the same shape and size, and also some truffles cut likewise. Add the Julienne to the chickens, moisten with very little broth (No. 194a), and Marsala wine, cover the saucepan and let cook in a slack oven; baste and moisten the chicken slowly, and as soon as the sauce is found to be sufficiently reduced, thicken it with veloute sauce (No. 415), egg-yolks, and cream, then dress the fillets in a pyramid, and pour the sauce over; garnish around with bread-crumb croutons cut heart-shaped, and fried in butter.

← No. 1835 Chicken Fillets or Breasts a la Bodisko Chicken No. 1837 Chicken Fillets or Breasts a la Chiselhurst →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stockpots and sauce bases already standing, so the cross-references do most of the work. Two things carry the dish: the julienne must be cut fine and even, and the finishing liaison must never boil.

The liaison is the hingeEgg yolks and cream stirred into the reduced cooking liquid will curdle the moment they see a simmer. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return it and hold the sauce below 180F while it thickens.
"Slack oven"A slack or slow oven means a cool one, in modern terms somewhere in the region of 275-325F; no exact figure can be pinned to the term. The point is that the covered pan barely trembles; the breasts are finishing gently in a little liquid, not braising hard.
Cooking timeSkin-on breast fillets sauteed to colour and then covered in a low oven will typically need somewhere around 15-20 minutes, and should reach 165F at the thickest point. Ranhofer's kitchen judged by the sauce reducing; a thermometer is faster and kinder to the meat.
Scale and yieldSix chickens yield twelve fillets; the recipe gives no number of servings, but one fillet a head is a reasonable reading. For four people, use four boneless skin-on breast halves and quarter everything else. Buy whole birds if you want the carcasses for the broth.
The cross-referenced numbersNo. 318 is Ranhofer's julienne cut, a fine even matchstick. No. 194a is one of his broths; No. 415 is the veloute the recipe names, a light stock thickened with a blond roux. A good reduced chicken stock plus a small white roux stands in for the veloute.
Carrots, mushrooms, truffles"the red part of carrots" means the outer flesh only, discarding the paler core; with modern carrots you can use the whole root. Blanch, drain, then cook in butter with mushrooms and truffle cut to match. Preserved truffle is a defensible substitute; truffle in a jar keeps the shape better than the flavour.
MarsalaDry Marsala rather than a sweet cream style suits the dish. Keep the liquid shallow, barely covering the bottom of the pan, since it is meant to reduce to a coating sauce; the recipe has you moisten again as it cooks.
CroutonsCut heart shapes from firm white bread with a small cutter and fry in clarified butter so they stay crisp under the sauce. Arrange them at the last moment; they soften within minutes.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) collects the working repertoire of Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and its chicken section runs to dozens of fillet preparations distinguished largely by garnish and by the name attached to them la Bodisko, la Chiselhurst, la Certosa as consecutive entries. Certosa points to Italy: the word means a Carthusian monastery, most famously the Certosa di Pavia, and the Italian accent here is the Marsala. Ranhofer's method is pure classical French all the same the julienne of carrot, mushroom and truffle, the covered pan finished in a slack oven, the velout bound with yolks and cream, the fried croutons set round a pyramid of meat. Naming a garnish after a place or a patron was standard practice in the period's grand restaurants, a way of multiplying menu items from a small number of techniques, and the truffle in this one signals what the dish was for: it is a plate meant to be recognised as expensive.