No. 1860

Chicken Fillets or Breasts with Cucumbers

Filets ou Ailes de Poulet aux Concombres

Obtain some very small clean chickens, raise the fillets and remove the minion fillets; pare the large fillets, suppress the skin and lard the tops with fine lardons (No. 4, Fig. 52) of larding pork, season and range them in a sautoir with butter, place this on a hot fire and two minutes later, remove and put them into a hot oven to let cook rare, but of a fine color, then glaze over with a brush, remove, drain and garnish the ends with favor frills (No. 10). Dress into the middle of a hot dish a garnishing of puree of cucumbers (No. 714), smooth the surface with the blade of a knife and dress the chicken fillets on the outside, pouring some supreme sauce (No. 547) around and serving more in a sauce boat.

← No. 1859 Chicken Fillets or Breasts, Mexican Style, i Chicken No. 1861 Chicken Fricassee →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade, and this entry leans on three cross-references the home cook has to fill in. The dish is simply larded chicken breast, roasted hot and fast, set around a cucumber purée with a cream sauce.

Doneness is the one thing to change"Let cook rare" reflects a kitchen that treated poultry breast like a small roast. Cook the fillets to 165F at the thickest point; they will still be juicy if you pull them the moment they reach it, and the hot oven and thin cut make that a matter of minutes.
"Very small clean chickens"He means small young birds, spring chickens rather than roasters; no weight is given, and they would be larger than a modern poussin. Two supermarket chicken breast halves stand in for the fillets of one such bird.
Fillets and minion filletsThe large fillet is the breast half; the minion fillet is the tenderloin strip underneath, which is removed here and saved for another dish. "Suppress the skin" simply means skin them.
LardingFine lardons of fresh pork fatback, threaded through the surface with a larding needle, kept lean breast from drying in a fierce oven. Fatback is a butcher-counter item now; a thin sheet of barding fat or a few strips of unsmoked pork belly laid over the top does the same work.
Sautoir and "a hot fire"A sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan. The two minutes on the stovetop is a colour-setting sear, after which the same pan goes into the oven. Ranhofer specifies only a "hot oven" and gives no temperature; a modern hot oven, in the region of 425 to 450F, is a reasonable reading.
GlazingThe brush carries meat glaze, that is, reduced brown stock cooked down to a syrup. A spoonful of well-reduced chicken stock gives the same gloss.
The two cross-referenced componentsNo. 714 is cucumber purée; the text of that entry is not on this page, but such purées were generally made from peeled, seeded cucumbers salted and drained, stewed in butter, then puréed and bound. No. 547, sauce suprême, is chicken velouté reduced with cream and finished with butter and lemon.
Favor frillsPaper cuffs clipped over the bone ends for the dining room. Purely decorative and unnecessary with boneless fillets.
YieldFour fillets, from two small birds, serve four as a course. Salt the cucumbers well: unsalted purée turns watery and thins the sauce.

A Little History

This is entry 1860 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The numbering itself tells you what kind of book it is: a professional reference in which every dish is a set of modules to be looked up, so a single line can invoke a cucumber purée and a sauce suprême without repeating either. Cucumbers as a hot vegetable, stewed in butter or puréed rather than sliced raw, appear often enough in nineteenth-century French kitchens, and pair with poultry for the same reason as the cream sauce, being mild and faintly sweet. Larding lean breast meat was routine work before reliable oven thermometers, when fat inserted into the meat was one common insurance against a dry roast, alongside barding and basting, and Ranhofer's instruction to keep the fillets underdone appears to belong to the same era, before poultry doneness came to be widely treated as a food-safety matter.