No. 1865

Chicken Fricassee a la Lucius

Fricassee de Poulet a la Lucius

Draw and singe a clean, white meat three pound chicken, cut it up into eight pieces and split the carcass in two, also the neck and legs, wash these pieces in tepid water, place them in a saucepan containing water to heat, simply to stiffen the meat, then drain, refresh and wipe well on a cloth. Boil half a pound of blanched rice in broth for twenty minutes, keeping it white and consistent; when ready pour it into a plain buttered border mold (Fig. 139), pressing it down well and keep it in a warm heater for eight minutes. Melt some butter in a saucepan, add to it the pieces of chicken with a garnished bouquet (No. 123), two quartered onions, salt and pepper corns, fry the chicken over a good fire without browning, dredge over a heaping spoonful of flour and continue cooking two minutes while stirring, take the saucepan from the fire, and pour in gradually some hot stock (No. 194a), stirring until it reaches boiling point; let cook for eight minutes on a moderate fire, then remove it to a slower fire to finish cooking the chicken; as fast as each of the pieces are done; the tenderest ones first, take them out, suppressing the legs and carcasses, then pare the remainder and lay them in another saucepan, strain the sauce, reduce it for a few moments to thicken, pour it over the chicken and finally finish the fricassee with a thickening of two raw egg-yolks, half a gill of cream and an ounce of butter divided in small pats; cook this thickening without letting it boil, and squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Dress the fricassee inside the rice border, unmold it on a hot dish, cover it moderately with the sauce and send the remainder to the table in a sauce-boat.

← No. 1864 Chicken Fricassee a la Favorite Chicken No. 1866 Chicken Fricassee a la Waleski →

For the Modern Kitchen

A white fricassee in the classical French manner: the chicken is never browned, and the sauce is finished off the heat with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two things decide whether it works — keeping colour out of the pan, and keeping the finished sauce below a simmer.

The hinge: the liaison must not boilTwo yolks, cream and butter go in at the end over the gentlest heat, and the sauce must stay under about 180F. A boil will scramble the yolks and break the sauce into grains that no whisking will recover. Take the pan off the burner and stir the hot sauce into the yolk-cream mixture first, then return it briefly.
Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — about 60 ml of heavy cream, used with two yolks and an ounce of butter to finish the reduced sauce.
"Stiffen the meat"The first step is a brief blanch: bring the pieces up in water just until the surfaces firm, then drain, refresh and dry thoroughly. This is what keeps a white fricassee white; skipping it leaves grey specks in the sauce.
Cross-referencesNo. 123 is Ranhofer's garnished bouquet, a tied bundle of herbs and aromatics. No. 194a is one of his stocks; an unsalted or low-sodium light chicken stock is the appropriate stand-in. Use enough hot stock to barely cover the pieces.
Blanched rice, and the border mold"Blanched" here means parboiled and rinsed, not white rice as sold today. Half a pound is about 1 1/4 cups dry; twenty minutes in broth gives grains soft enough to pack. Fig. 139 is a ring mold — a buttered 8-inch savarin or bundt-style ring works, pressed firmly so it unmolds in one piece.
"A warm heater"A plate warmer or steam table. An oven at its lowest setting, around 175-200F, holds the packed rice for the eight minutes it needs to set without drying.
Cooking times and staged removalBreast pieces are done in roughly 15-18 minutes at a bare simmer, thighs and drumsticks in 25-30. Ranhofer's instruction to lift each piece as it finishes is the whole point; cooked to a single time, the breast is dry before the legs give way.
"Suppressing the legs and carcasses"The legs (meaning the lower drumstick ends and feet in the original butchery) and the split carcass are cooked for flavour, then discarded from the dish. They are worth keeping back for stock rather than throwing out.
YieldA three-pound bird served inside a rice border feeds four as a main course, or six at a table with other dishes.

A Little History

Fricassée is one of the oldest names in French cookery — generally traced to the sixteenth century for meat cut up, sautéed in fat and finished in its own sauce, though the verb is attested earlier — and by the nineteenth it had settled into a firm distinction between the browned brown fricassee and the white one, where the cook's skill was measured by how little colour reached the pan. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), gives a run of chicken fricassees, each differentiated by a garnish or a name attached to a patron, a colleague or an occasion; "à la Lucius" belongs to that habit of naming rather than to any documented dish, and what actually distinguishes it here is the rice border. Such bordures, molded rings of rice, semolina or forcemeat filled with a ragout, were a familiar presentation in the grand restaurants — they held a saucy dish in shape, and they let a kitchen send out something that looked composed rather than ladled.