No. 1842

Chicken Fillets or Breasts, Epicurean

Filets ou Ailes de Poulet a l'Epicurienne

Prepare the fillets of six young two-pound chickens, observing that they be white and tender; remove the skin and epidermis and lard them with fine larding pork (No. 4, Fig. 52), place them in a buttered sautoir and let cook to attain color in a very hot oven, then drain and decorate with frills (No. 10). Streak each minion fillet with six round thin slices of truffles, roll them into rings and place them in a buttered sautoir to poach in the oven without coloring. Dress the large fillets on a forcemeat ring and decorate the outside with the minion fillets. Detach the glaze from the bottom of the sautoir with a little sherry wine, free it of all fat and add a little veloute sauce (No. 415); thicken just when ready to serve with raw egg-yolks diluted with cream and fresh butter; run the sauce through a tammy and pour a part over the breasts and minions and the balance in a sauceboat. Make twelve five-eights of an inch diameter balls with foies-gras taken direct from a terrine, rubbed through a sieve; dip them in eggs, roll in bread-crumbs and fry in very hot frying fat; place one of these balls in the center of each minion fillet ring and serve at once.

← No. 1841 Chicken Fillets or Breasts a l'Imperatrice Chicken No. 1843 Chicken Fillets or Wings a la Genin →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a larder of prepared bases on hand; the dish is straightforward once you accept that the sauce and the garnish are separate small projects. Read the cross-references as shopping list, not as detours.

The hinge: the egg-yolk liaisonThe velouté is finished with raw yolks diluted in cream and butter, and it must not boil afterward or it will curdle and break. Keep it well below a simmer, stir until it coats, and pass it through a fine sieve (Ranhofer's "tammy" is a straining cloth); part is poured over the breasts and minions, the rest sent to table in a sauceboat.
Fillet and minion filletEach breast yields the large fillet and, underneath, the small strip modern butchers call the tender. Six two-pound chickens give twelve large fillets and twelve tenders, which matches the twelve foie gras balls the recipe calls for.
Sautoir and oven heatA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan; use any heavy ovenproof skillet. The larded large fillets go into what Ranhofer calls "a very hot oven," hot enough to take color quickly; the truffle-studded rings are poached "without coloring," so a gentle oven, covered, until just firm.
Larding porkFine lardons of fresh unsmoked pork fatback threaded through the meat with a larding needle. On a modern breast this reads as decorative as much as functional; thin barding with fatback or caul fat achieves much the same with less equipment.
Epidermis and frillsThe "epidermis" is the thin membrane under the skin, which shrinks and toughens. Frills are the paper cuffs slipped over the exposed wing bone, purely for presentation and safely omitted.
Forcemeat ringA chicken or veal forcemeat baked in a ring mould, turned out to form the base the fillets lean against. A firm mousseline of chicken breast, egg white and cream, poached in a buttered ring mould in a water bath, is the same thing.
Truffles and foie grasSix thin rounds of black truffle are inserted into slits along each tender before it is curled into a ring, so the slices show as dark dots. Terrine foie gras sieved and rolled into 5/8-inch balls will be very soft; chill them hard before breading, and fry only long enough to crisp the crumb, seconds at 350-375F, or they melt away.
ServingEverything is warm rather than hot and nothing holds. Have the forcemeat ring, sauce and fried balls ready before the fillets leave the oven.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer was chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down at encyclopedic length, with recipes numbered and cross-referenced like a legal code. The construction here is pure haute-cuisine grammar of the period: a farce base, a symmetrical ring of small fillets, truffle inlay, a velouté, and a fried croquette of foie gras as the final flourish. Chicken breast served as a composed centerpiece rather than as part of a carved bird would have meant buying whole small birds and using the legs and carcasses elsewhere. The two-pound chickens Ranhofer specifies are far smaller than today's supermarket broilers, a reminder that the standard table bird has roughly doubled in size since he wrote.