Important: Safety Warning

This page directs cooking an acidic wine reduction in an untinned copper pan. Acidic food in bare copper dissolves copper salts into what is eaten, which causes vomiting, diarrhoea and, with repeated exposure, liver and kidney damage.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 1884

Chickens a la Bourguignonne—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Bourguignonne

Clean and singe two small chickens, then cut them up into five parts; range these in a sautoir with melted butter and oil, some shallots and mushroom peelings; season and fry to a good color on both sides; finish to cook in a slow oven being careful to withdraw the fillets and breasts as quickly as they are done, take out all the pieces from the sautoir, unglaze its bottom with a gill of Madeira and a pint of half-glaze sauce (No. 413), strain and reduce by incorporating into it slowly two gills of Burgundy wine, previously boiled in a red copper untinned pan with aromatics and mushroom peelings. When the sauce becomes succulent, pour it over the dressed chickens and surround them with a circle of round, flat croutons of bread fried in butter and having one side covered with a layer of baking forcemeat (No. 81), glazed over with a brush and kept warm at the oven door.

← No. 1883 Chickens, Tomato Conde Sauce—Stuffed Chicken No. 1885 Chickens a la d'Antin—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stockpots already simmering, so the work here is mostly in the two sauce components he assumes you have on hand. Read the notes on the copper pan before you start.

The untinned copper panBoiling acidic wine in bare copper leaches copper salts into it. Reduce the Burgundy in stainless or enamelled steel instead.
Cutting into five partsRanhofer does not say which five; a common breakdown is two legs, two wing-and-breast pieces and the carcass. Two small birds give ten pieces.
Pull the breasts earlyThis is the hinge of the dish. Breast and fillet cook well before the legs do; leaving everything in until the legs are ready gives you dry white meat under a good sauce. Poultry should reach 165F internal.
A slow ovenRoughly 300F, though period usage varies. The colour has already been built in the sautoir on the stovetop, so the oven is only finishing the cooking through.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, wider than a saucepan and deeper than a skillet. Any heavy 12-inch pan that can go from burner to oven will do, so long as the pieces sit in one layer and are not crowded.
A gill and two gillsA gill is half a cup. So half a cup of Madeira to deglaze, and one cup of Burgundy reduced separately with aromatics.
Half-glaze sauce, No. 413Demi-glace: espagnole reduced with brown stock. A pint of it is the body of the sauce and there is no shortcut worth the name; a good reduced veal stock is the nearest substitute.
Mushroom peelingsTrimmings saved from other work, used twice here, in the pan and in the wine reduction. Sliced mushroom stems or a few dried mushrooms give the same savoury backing.
Baking forcemeat, No. 81, and the croutonsA bound forcemeat stiff enough to hold its shape on the crouton under heat. Spread it on the fried bread rounds, brush with glaze and hold them at the open oven door so they stay warm and dry rather than steaming.

A Little History

A la bourguignonne means, straightforwardly, in the manner of Burgundy: a red-wine sauce, the wine reduced hard and mounted onto a brown base. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives a run of sauted chicken variations in a single stretch of numbered entries, each distinguished by a wine, a garnish and a name borrowed from a French region or a patron. The instruction to boil the wine in an untinned copper pan is a period detail worth noticing: cooks valued bare copper for what it did to the colour of acidic reductions.