No. 1861

Chicken Fricassee

Fricassee de Poulet

Take a well cleansed chicken of two and a half to three pounds; cut the two fillets, the legs, the breast in one, back in two and two wings retaining all the skin. Fill a saucepan with cold water, and soak the pieces of chicken in it for one hour, then throw this off and replace it by one quart of cold water adding to it two medium onions, one containing a clove, a bunch of parsley garnished with a bay leaf and thyme, salt and pepper. Cook the chickens, skim and let simmer gently, be sure that the chicken is cooked before taking them out, and when done, drain on a colander, then lay the pieces in cold water; make a roux with three ounces of butter and three ounces of flour, cook for a few moments without browning, then put in the chicken stock and the liquid from a pound of mushroom heads, as soon as the sauce comes to a boil, remove it to the corner of the range for half an hour. Pare and clean the pieces of chicken carefully, lay them in a low saucepan, remove all the fat from the sauce and pour it through a wire sieve on the chicken, cover and heat it over a slow fire, thicken with four egg-yolks and one ounce of butter by first diluting the yolks with a little of the sance and increasing gradually until half the sauce is combined with the eggs, then stir it all together, set it on the fire and roll the pieces in; after the sauce thickens, strain it again through a tammy, add the mushrooms to the sauce. Dress the chicken by forming a high square with the two back pieces and the two wings, in the center of the dish; place the two fillets and two legs against the square and the piece of breast on top, cover with the sauce, putting the mushrooms on the four corners, pour the sauce over and garnish around with small round rice croquettes made with almond milk.

← No. 1860 Chicken Fillets or Breasts with Cucumbers Chicken No. 1862 Chicken Fricassee a la Bouchard →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's fricassée is a white stew: the chicken is poached rather than browned, and the cooking liquid becomes a velouté finished with egg yolks. Nothing here is difficult, but the liaison at the end is unforgiving.

The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the four yolks go in, the sauce must not boil. Hold it below about 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; a boil will curdle it into grains that no straining will fix. Tempering the yolks with half the hot sauce first, as written, is the whole safeguard.
"The corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the coolest spot. Read it as the lowest burner setting, or a heat diffuser, for a bare simmer while the sauce clears itself of fat and flour taste.
The hour-long soakSoaking the cut pieces in cold water draws out blood so the finished sauce stays pale. With modern chilled, well-bled chicken this is largely cosmetic; 20-30 minutes is plenty, or skip it if you are not chasing an ivory-white sauce.
Poaching timeThe recipe gives none. A 2 1/2 to 3 lb bird cut up needs roughly 25-35 minutes at a gentle simmer, wings and breast coming out first, legs last. Boiling hard will shred the meat and cloud the stock.
Mushroom liquid"The liquid from a pound of mushroom heads" means the liquor from mushrooms cooked briefly in a little water, butter and lemon, not raw mushroom juice. Cook them white, reserve the caps for the garnish, and use the liquor to loosen the roux along with the chicken stock.
Roux proportionsThree ounces each of butter and flour to roughly a quart of liquid is a heavy veloute by current taste. The half hour at the corner of the range is for skimming fat and scum off the surface rather than for reduction, so it will not thin the sauce; if the result is stiffer than you want, loosen it with more stock before the yolks go in.
Straining through a tammyA tammy was a woven cloth the sauce was wrung through. A fine chinois lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same job, and the sauce should go through warm, not hot enough to scramble.
The rice croquettesAlmond milk here is the traditional ground-almond infusion, not the carton drink, which is far more dilute and often sweetened. The croquettes are a sweet-savoury foil; plain buttered rice or steamed potatoes serve the same purpose.
YieldOne bird, four servings as a main course. The architectural presentation is Delmonico's dining-room style and can be abandoned without loss.

A Little History

Fricassee sits between a saute and a stew: the meat is cooked in liquid without colour, and the liquid becomes the sauce, thickened with roux and finished with egg yolks (and, in many versions though not this one, cream). The word is old French, in use well before it entered English in the sixteenth century, and by the nineteenth fricasseed chicken was familiar enough in America to be a common household dish. This version comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the difference between household and restaurant practice: Ranhofer poaches, cools, pares each piece clean, strains the sauce twice and then builds the chicken into a squared tower with mushrooms at the corners. The egg-yolk finish, called a liaison, belongs to an older thickening tradition than the roux-based sauces later codified in the nineteenth century; here Ranhofer uses both.