No. 1839

Chicken Fillets or Breasts a l'Ecarlate

Filets ou Ailes de Poulet a l'Ecarlate

Take the fillets from six medium chickens, remove all the skin and epidermis, detach the minion fillets and free them of the sinew and skin which covers them, streak them with pieces of beef tongue and form into rings and place in a buttered sautoir. Saute the large fillets over a brisk fire with butter. Cut twelve slices of very red beef tongue into half hearts the size of the fillets and three-sixteenths of an inch thick; warm them in stock (No. 194a) and just when ready to serve, drain and decorate each fillet with a favor frill (No. 10), dress in a circle having them intercalated with the half-hearts of tongue. Poach the minion fillet rings, fill the inside of the circle with a garnishing composed of small mushroom heads, truffle balls and quenelles all mixed with veloute sauce (No. 415), reduced with cream, and range the minion fillets around the whole; serve a well buttered veloute sauce separately.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a larder full of cross-references; stripped of those, this is a dish of sautéed chicken suprêmes plated in a ring with cured tongue, with the tenders poached separately as garnish. Everything hinges on the tongue being genuinely scarlet, since that colour is the whole point of the name.

À l'écarlate means the tongueScarlet colour in nineteenth-century tongue came from a saltpetre cure. Buy a ready-cured, cooked beef tongue (sold as pickled or corned tongue) rather than fresh, which cooks grey-brown and defeats the presentation.
Fillets and minion filletsThe large fillet is the suprême, the breast lobe; the minion fillet is the tender lying beneath it, which has a tough central sinew that must be pulled out. Six chickens give twelve of each.
"Streak them with pieces of beef tongue"Most likely larding: thin batons of tongue inserted into the surface of the meat, in Ranhofer's usual sense of the word. Chill the tongue firm before cutting the batons or they shred. Lacking a larding needle, the tenders can be wrapped around a tongue baton and pinned into a ring, though the recipe does not say so.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. The rings are poached rather than fried; the recipe says only that they go into a buttered sautoir and are poached, without naming a liquid or a cover.
TimingNo times are given, as is usual throughout the book. Suprêmes over a brisk fire want roughly 3-4 minutes a side and should come off at about 165F; the tender rings poach in 3-4 minutes. Cooked much beyond that they will be dry and stringy.
Removing "the epidermis"The thin translucent membrane over the breast. It shrinks and curls in the pan, so pull it off with a paper towel for grip.
The cross-referencesNo. 194a is a stock, No. 415 a velouté, No. 10 a paper favor frill, as the recipe itself indicates. Any good chicken velouté reduced with cream will serve; the frills are decorative and entirely optional.
YieldTwelve fillets and twelve tender rings, with tongue half-hearts cut from twelve slices, make a service for six to eight as a main course, or twelve at a longer dinner where it is one of several removes.

A Little History

À l'écarlate — "in scarlet" — is an old French kitchen term for meat, and above all beef tongue, cured with salt and saltpetre until it takes on a bright red colour; boeuf à l'écarlate appears in French cookery writing well before Ranhofer, and by the nineteenth century the phrase on a menu essentially promised the presence of that vivid pink-red tongue against something pale. This recipe comes from The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, a book organised less as a manual than as a numbered system in which almost every preparation refers to another. The chicken chapter alone runs to dozens of suprême variations distinguished chiefly by their garnish and plating, which tells you what a fashionable American restaurant kitchen of the period actually sold: not new flavours so much as new arrangements, built from a fixed repertoire of velouté, quenelles, truffle and mushroom, and priced by the labour that went into the assembly.