No. 1867

Chicken Fricassee with Crustacean Sauce

Fricassee de Poulet au Coulis de Crustaces

Wash in plenty of water, then cook four dozen crawfish with white wine, an onion, parsley roots, thyme, bay leaf, a grain of pepper and salt; let cook over a brisk fire for five minutes, and after the first boil strain the broth through a fine sieve, then through a napkin; let it settle and pour the top off gently. Detach the tails from the crawfish bodies, pick out the meats, trim and keep them hot while covered. Chop up the tail parings and the claw meats, mix with an equal quantity of cooked chopped mushrooms, season and add a very thick bechamel (No. 409) reduced with a little chicken glaze (No. 398) so as to have a consistent preparation, then season with a coffeespoon of prepared red paper (No. 168); keep this in a bain-marie. Fasten a fried bread support on a dish. Put into a sautoir containing butter, two two-pound chickens each one divided into five pieces and parboiled in water, removing them at the first broil to drain, and fry in butter, keeping them white; season, dredge over a tablespoonful of flour for each chicken, moisten gradually with hot broth (No. 194a) and boil the liquid without ceasing to stir, letting it be in this state for eight to ten minutes; finish cooking the chickens over a slow fire. Use the crawfish hash to fill some hollow semicircular crusts; cover this with a layer of the reduced thick bechamel (No. 409) bestrew with grated parmesan and glaze under a salamander (Fig. 123); when the chickens are ready dress them on the dish leaning against the prepared support intercalating them with the crawfish tails; reduce the sauce by incorporating into it a few spoonfuls of the crawfish liquor and thicken with four egg-yolks and half a gill of cream, finishing with red butter (No. 580). Strain some of this over the chickens and serve the remainder in a sauce-boat; surround the chickens with the filled crusts after they are baked and browned.

← No. 1866 Chicken Fricassee a la Waleski Chicken No. 1868 Chicken Fricassee with Curry →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a brigade with a stockpot always on the fire, and this dish leans on four numbered preparations from elsewhere in The Epicurean. The hinge is the finish: once the four yolks and cream go in, the sauce must not boil.

The cross-referencesNo. 409 is béamel, No. 398 chicken glaze, No. 194a a broth, No. 580 red butter, No. 168 a red-pepper preparation. Ordinary béchamel reduced until it mounds on a spoon, plus a spoon of reduced stock, gets you where he is going.
"Prepared red paper"Almost certainly a misprint for prepared red pepper; No. 168 is Ranhofer's red-pepper (cayenne) preparation. A pinch of cayenne serves; a coffeespoon is a small spoon measure, somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon.
Red butterNo. 580 is shell butter: the crawfish heads and shells pounded with butter, warmed, then strained. It is where most of the colour and nearly all the perfume comes from, so do not discard the bodies after picking the tails.
Four dozen crawfishPicked tails from 48 crawfish come to only a few ounces of meat, well under a cup once trimmed — enough for garnish and hash, not for bulk. Whole head-on shrimp can stand in, though the cooking liquor will be less sweet.
Five minutes, and no moreCrawfish are done the moment they turn red through. The recipe's five minutes over a brisk fire is right; longer and the tails turn to cork. Pull them from the court-bouillon, then reduce the liquor separately if you want more flavour.
Keeping the chicken whiteTwo 2-lb birds, each cut in five, are blanched and then sweated in butter without colouring — the fricassee tradition. Modern practice is the same, but check the thigh joints reach 165F; the eight to ten minutes of hard boiling followed by slow simmering usually takes 30 to 35 minutes in all.
Gill and salamanderHalf a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons. The salamander is a top-heat browner; a broiler set high, with the crusts near the element, does the job in a minute or two.
The liaisonYolks and cream go into the reduced sauce off the heat, and it is then held below about 180F. A single boil after this point curdles it, and there is no recovering the texture.
Assembly and yieldAssembly -- The fried bread support is a croûton socle — a thick slice of bread shaped, fried and used as a plinth so the pieces lean upright. Ten pieces of chicken will stretch to six or eight portions; the recipe does not say how many filled semicircular crusts to make.

A Little History

This is Charles Ranhofer's cooking at Delmonico's in New York, published in The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years in that kitchen, and the recipe shows how the classical French repertoire was being written down for an American audience — fricassée de poulet, a white ragoût of chicken bound with egg and cream, dressed up with a crustacean garnish. The numbered cross-references are the book's real character. Ranhofer assumed a reader with béchamel, glaze, broth and shell butter already made, which is less a recipe than a set of instructions for a kitchen that never stopped working.