No. 1886

Chickens a la Diva—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Diva

Choose good, medium-sized chickens of about two pounds each; draw, singe, and suppress well all the adhering feathers; detach the legs and wings leaving on the pinions and sufficient meat on the breast bones so that they are of the same size as the other four pieces. Put some butter to melt in a sautoir, and when a light brown, lay in the pieces of chicken, seasoning with salt, pepper, and powdered sweet peppers; toss without browning, and moisten with about a gill of veal blond (No. 423) to detach the glaze, and then finish cooking the chickens, moistening as quickly as the stock reduces, and when sufficiently done, dress. Add to the sauce some bechamel (No. 409) and tomato sauce (No. 549), a little tarragon vinegar, and some chopped, blanched shallot; just when ready to serve, thicken with egg-yolks, and butter; strain through a tammy, and pour it over the chickens, bestrewing the top with very green chopped parsley; garnish around with small flat chicken croquettes (No. 877), and inch and a quarter in diameter by half an inch in thickness, and between each of these lay a bordelaise crawfish (No. 1008), placing a channeled mushroom (No. 118) on top of every croquette.

← No. 1885 Chickens a la d'Antin—Sauted Chicken No. 1887 Chicken a la Dodds—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's sauté in the full nineteenth-century manner: the bird is cooked in butter and stock, and the pan liquid becomes a yolk-thickened sauce built from two other sauces in the book. The hinge is the finish, not the cooking.

The egg-yolk liaisonOnce the yolks and butter go in, the sauce must not return to a simmer or it will curdle and break past saving. Pull the pan off the heat, whisk the yolks with a little of the hot sauce first, then stir the mixture back in and hold it below about 180F only long enough to thicken.
Sautoir and tammyA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan wide enough to hold the pieces in one layer; crowding steams the chicken instead of glazing it. A tammy was a woven cloth strainer — a fine-mesh sieve does much the same work, and pressing the sauce through it is what gives the smooth finish.
A gillHalf a cup. It is deliberately small: the point is to loosen the glaze in the pan and then add more stock in short pours as each addition reduces, so the chicken finishes coated rather than boiled.
Veal blondRanhofer's No. 423 is a pale veal stock; the name refers to its light colour. A good unsalted veal or light chicken stock substitutes without harming the dish; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the pale sauce.
Powdered sweet peppersMost likely paprika. Use a sweet, not smoked, paprika, and add it with the salt and pepper so it goes into the butter with the seasoning.
Two-pound chickensSmaller than a supermarket roaster, closer to a small broiler. Each bird is divided into six pieces of roughly equal size: two legs, two wings with the pinions left on, and two breast pieces trimmed to match. About 3 lb of bone-in thighs, drumsticks and split breast will stand in.
TimingNo times are given. Pieces this size need roughly 20 to 25 minutes; breast pieces are done several minutes before the legs, so lift them out and keep them warm rather than cooking everything to the same clock.
The sauce, in shortBéchamel plus tomato sauce is what later kitchens call sauce aurore. A cup of medium béchamel to about a third of a cup of tomato sauce gives roughly the right colour and body, with the tarragon vinegar and blanched shallot added to sharpen it.
Garnish and yieldThe croquettes, crayfish and fluted mushroom caps are three separate recipes elsewhere in the book; the dish stands on the sauce without them. No yield is given, and the recipe calls for more than one bird — each bird cut this way serves three or four.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, a tenure spanning the 1860s to 1896, and its dedications read like a guest list — dishes named for financiers, hostesses, ambassadors and performers. "À la Diva" is often said to belong to that habit, though the recipe and the book say nothing of its naming; French restaurant cooking of the period did routinely borrow prestige from the opera house. The construction is textbook Escoffier-era practice, and predates Escoffier's own Guide Culinaire of 1903 by nine years — a sauté assembled from stock mothers already standing in the kitchen, then thickened at the last moment with yolks and butter. That cross-referencing by number is the book's signature and its difficulty: almost nothing in it can be cooked without turning to three or four other pages, which tells you it was written for a brigade with a full garde-manger behind it, not for a household cook working alone.