No. 1863

Chicken Fricassee a la Chevaliere

Fricassee de Poulet a la Chevaliere

After the chickens are singed, remove the pouch and raise the fillets whole, with the pinions; slide the blade of a keen, thin knife between the meat and skin covering the fillets, lard them over with fine shreds of pork and lay them in a lightly buttered sauteing pan. Pare the minion fillets and lard them with either truffles or tongue, then shape them into rounds, two and a quarter inches in diameter; place them in a buttered sautoir on thin slices of fat pork. Cut up the remainder of the chickens and cook them the same as for the plain chicken fricassee (No. 1861). Trim the legs and bread-crumb them. Prepare and cook a croustade the same width as the serving dish, having it three inches high, glaze the larded fillets; cook the minion fillets, and fry the legs to a nice golden color. Dress the backs and wings in the center of the croustade; cover lightly with allemande sauce (No. 407), then range the legs leaving them against the backs; place the larded fillets between these legs, and the minion fillets around; in each of the latter set a fine glazed truffle, then glaze the fillets. Serve with a veloute sauce (No. 415), thickened when ready, with egg-yolks, butter, and cream; heat well without boiling, and throw in some chopped mushrooms.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed platter rather than a stew: one bird is broken into five distinct preparations, each cooked its own way, then reassembled on a bread plinth. Read the whole thing through before you start, and note that everything hinges on the finishing sauce.

Never boil the finished veloutéThe sauce is thickened at the last moment with egg yolks, butter and cream, which is why Ranhofer says to heat it well without boiling. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains; hold it just below a shiver and pull it off the heat to add the mushrooms.
"Minion fillets" are the tendersThe filet mignon of a chicken is the small strip of muscle lying under each breast fillet — what a supermarket sells as the tenderloin. Two per bird, so a single chicken gives only two of the truffle-studded rounds; scale the bird count to the number of guests.
Larding, in two sensesThe breast fillets are threaded with shreds of pork fat after the skin covering them has been loosened with the blade of a thin knife, as Ranhofer directs; the tenders are larded with truffle or cooked tongue, which reads as being for the marbled cross-section. On lean breast meat the pork larding also adds fat to a dry cut.
Sautoir and sauteing panBoth mean a straight-sided shallow pan rather than a sloped skillet. The recipe says only to lay the fillets in it lightly buttered, and to set the minion fillets on thin slices of fat pork.
GlazingTo glaze here is to brush with a glace de viande — veal or chicken stock reduced to a syrup — and flash under heat until it shines. It is not sugar and not a broiler crust.
The croustadeA case three inches high and as wide as the serving dish, as directed. The recipe does not specify the material or method; it is structural, since everything is arranged on and against it.
Allemande and veloutéBoth are white sauces built on chicken velouté; allemande is velouté enriched with egg yolks and lemon, used here as a light coating, while the velouté is thickened with yolks, butter and cream at the last moment and served with the dish. Modern chicken velouté — blond roux plus good stock, simmered and skimmed — serves as the base for both.
TrufflesPreserved truffles in brine are the practical substitute; the peelings sold in jars will work for larding the tenders even if they will not give you "a fine glazed truffle" to crown each round.
YieldOne chicken dressed this way serves two to three as a main course. For six, work with two or three birds — which also gives you enough backs and wings to fill the center of the croustade convincingly.

A Little History

This is Charles Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen at full stretch. The Epicurean (1894) collected roughly three decades of his cooking for New York's richest dining room, and the fricassee here has almost nothing to do with the plain stewed-and-white-sauced dish an American household cook would have recognized under the same name — Ranhofer even cross-references that simpler version at No. 1861 for the odds and ends. À la chevalière is usually glossed from chevalier, "knight," in its feminine form, though such garnish names are traditional labels rather than documented coinages; it belongs to the enormous vocabulary of nineteenth-century French garnish names, most of which signal a particular arrangement rather than a particular flavor, and the style is generally associated with neatly trimmed fillets ranged in a ring and given height by a croustade. Breaking a single bird into breast, tender, leg, wing and back and giving each a different treatment produces a platter meant to be presented whole and to look composed from every side.