Important: Safety Warning

This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.

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

No. 1888

Chickens a la Dumas—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Dumas

Cut three chickens into five pieces each, having two legs, two wings and one breastbone piece; season with salt and pepper and toss them in butter with three small chopped shallots; remove the wings and breasts as rapidly as they are cooked and finish the legs, which take longer. Pare all the pieces and return them to a sautoir on the fire with a clear top part of the butter and three-quarters of a pound of minced mushrooms, pour over a few spoonfuls of thin bechamel (No. 409), roll them in the sauce without allowing it to boil. Detach the glaze from the other sautoir with a little Madeira, and add it to the sauce. Blanch three-quarters of a pound of rice, drain and place it in a saucepan and moisten it to three times its height, meaning if there be two inches high of rice, put in six inches high of unskimmed broth (No. 194a); boil, cover the saucepan and finish in the oven; it will take about twenty minutes. When the rice is sufficiently done, add to it three-quarters of a pound of very red beef tongue cut in small three-sixteenths of an inch squares, also three ounces of butter and the same quantity of grated parmesan cheese, a teaspoonful of powdered sweet peppers and a bit of cayenne pepper. Fill a plain buttered border mold (Fig. 139) with this prepared rice, keep it warm and when ready to serve invert it on a dish; dress the chickens pyramid-form in the center and cover the whole with the sauce thickened with egg-yolks, cream and butter, finishing with a pinch of prepared red pepper (No. 168). Garnish around with breaded and fried spinal marrow of veal, and send a sauce-boat of the same sauce to the table with the chicken.

← No. 1887 Chicken a la Dodds—Sauted Chicken No. 1889 Chickens a la Finnoise—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock, béchamel and glaze already on hand; read the recipe as three separate jobs — the sauté, the tongue-and-parmesan rice border, and the egg-yolk finished sauce — and it comes together in one pan plus a saucepan. Quantities are for a Delmonico's table: three chickens will serve eight to ten.

The hinge: the sauce must never boilThe hinge: do not let the sauce boil -- The recipe is explicit that the chicken is rolled in the thin bechamel "without allowing it to boil." The final liaison of yolks, cream and butter is the genuinely fragile stage: finish it over low heat or in a bain-marie only until it coats a spoon, and do not let it come to a simmer.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the pieces in one layer. Two pans are in play here: the birds finish in the second one, while the first is deglazed with Madeira and that glaze is poured into the sauce.
Cutting into fiveTwo legs (whole, thigh and drumstick together), two wings, and the breastbone section as one piece. Pulling the wings and breast out as soon as they are done is the point of the method; the recipe notes only that the legs take longer and are finished afterwards.
"Powdered sweet peppers" and "prepared red pepper"Both read as sweet paprika; No. 168 is a cross-reference to Ranhofer's own red pepper preparation elsewhere in the book. A good Hungarian or Spanish sweet paprika stands in.
WeightsThree-quarters of a pound is 12 oz — that applies separately to the mushrooms, the raw rice and the tongue. Use long-grain rice; blanching it briefly in salted water before the broth keeps the grains distinct.
The rice, oven and vesselMoistening "to three times its height" is roughly a 1:3 rice-to-liquid ratio by volume. Bring to a boil on the stove, cover, and finish in the oven; the recipe allows about twenty minutes but gives no temperature. A buttered ring mold or savarin mold replaces the border mold; pack it firmly, hold it warm, and unmold onto a hot platter.
Unskimmed brothNo. 194a is a cross-reference to one of Ranhofer's broths, used here with its fat left on, which is what enriches the rice. Stock with a spoonful of butter or chicken fat added does the same thing; salt at the end, since the tongue and parmesan both carry salt.
Very red beef tongueThe colour comes from curing — a cooked, brined tongue, sold by delicatessens as pickled or corned tongue. Cut in scant 3/16-inch dice; smoked tongue or a good cooked ham are the usual substitutes.
Fried spinal marrow of vealBovine spinal cord, poached, breaded and fried. Spinal cord from cattle above the relevant age thresholds is classed as specified risk material under BSE controls in the EU, the UK and Canada and cannot enter the food chain; even where calf spinal cord is not caught by those rules it is effectively unobtainable at retail. Skip the garnish. Breaded and fried veal sweetbreads, or croquettes of the rice, give the same effect on the plate.

A Little History

The name honours Alexandre Dumas père, whose posthumous Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873) made the novelist a fixture on French menus of the period. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, included it in The Epicurean (1894) among a range of sautéd chicken variations, each distinguished by garnish and sauce rather than by technique. The construction here is pure late-nineteenth-century restaurant grammar: a moulded rice border, the meat piled pyramid-form in the centre, a yolk-thickened sauce poured over and more sent separately in a boat, with a crisp fried garnish ringing the base. The tongue-and-parmesan rice is made by a pilaf method — boiled and oven-finished in three times its volume of broth, with butter and cheese stirred in at the end — then pressed into a mould.