No. 1890

Chickens a la Florentine—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Florentine

Cut up three one and a half pound chickens in four pieces each, season with salt, pepper, ground cloves and a teaspoonful of powdered sweet Spanish peppers; saute them in half oil and half butter, and add six ounces of raw, unsmoked ham cut in quarter inch dice; turn over to color evenly and keep sauteing on the fire, or else set the pan in a slow oven and when done drain off the pieces; add to these two gills of Malaga wine, a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414), three tablespoonfuls of meat-glaze (No. 402), and six tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce (No. 549), also three dozen small onions that have been blanched and cooked in white broth (No. 194a), six dozen carrot balls each five-eighths of an inch in diameter, blanched for ten minutes then finished with white broth and a little sugar; three dozen turned and channeled mushroom heads (No. 118) cooked in a little water, butter, salt, lemon juice and six ounces of minced truffles. Boil up the whole, dress the chicken with the garnishing around; reduce the sauce to perfection, pouring half of it over the chicken, and trim the legs and wings with frills (No. 10); strain the remainder of the sauce and serve it separately.

← No. 1889 Chickens a la Finnoise—Sauted Chicken No. 1891 Chickens a la Madeleine—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stocks and sauces already standing; the dish is really an assembly of five separately cooked components bound in one sauce. Read the garnish list first and cook backwards from it.

The hingeEverything but the chicken and the ham is cooked separately and only warmed through in the finished sauce. The ham dices go into the saute pan with the birds; the onions, carrot balls and mushrooms go in at the last boil-up; if they stew in the espagnole they lose their definition and the plate turns brown.
Gills and wineA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of Malaga — a sweet fortified wine, closest today to a cream sherry or a sweet Madeira. It is meant to sweeten and round the espagnole, not to be a cooking liquor.
Powdered sweet Spanish peppersThis is paprika, distinct from the cayenne called for elsewhere in the book; a teaspoonful of sweet paprika across three birds is for colour and warmth rather than heat.
Raw, unsmoked hamHe means an unsmoked cured ham of the prosciutto crudo type, not fresh pork leg. Unsmoked pancetta or a plain salt-cured ham cut in quarter-inch dice will do the same work; anything smoked will dominate the sauce.
The birdsThree chickens of a pound and a half each are much smaller than a modern roaster, closer to a spring chicken or Cornish game hen, quartered to give twelve small pieces. One 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken cut into eight is the practical substitute, though the pieces will need longer in the pan and the skin-to-meat ratio changes.
Slow ovenA gentle heat, roughly 275-325F in modern terms; Ranhofer gives no figures. The pan goes in to finish the saute gently once the pieces have taken colour on the stove.
The vegetable garnishCarrot balls five-eighths of an inch across come from the larger end of a Parisienne scoop; six dozen is a good half hour of work. Blanch ten minutes, then glaze in broth with a pinch of sugar until the liquid is syrupy. The turned and channelled mushroom caps are decorative — plain small caps cooked in butter, water, salt and lemon taste identical.
Sauces and glazeEspagnole (No. 414) is a brown sauce built on brown roux and veal stock; meat-glaze (No. 402) is stock reduced to a syrup. A good reduced brown veal stock stands in for both, with the glaze approximated by reducing a further cup down to three tablespoons.
TrufflesSix ounces of minced truffle is a nineteenth-century restaurant quantity and would now cost more than the rest of the dish combined. Reduce it drastically or leave it out; the garnish holds together without it.
FrillsNo. 10 refers to the paper cutlet frills slipped over the exposed leg and wing bones. Purely for the service; nothing is lost by omitting them.
YieldSix generous portions, or eight in a longer menu. Half the reduced sauce coats the birds, the rest is strained and passed at table.

A Little History

À la florentine normally signals spinach, and its absence here is a reminder that Charles Ranhofer's garnish names at Delmonico's were often loose geographical gestures rather than fixed codes — paprika, tomato, Malaga and ham read as southern and warm, and that was enough. The Epicurean (1894) is the record of thirty-odd years of Ranhofer's cooking at the New York restaurant, and this entry sits in a long run of numbered sautéed chicken variations, each distinguished only by its garnish and wine. The structure is pure Escoffier-era brigade logic before Escoffier codified it: the sauté itself is a few minutes' work, while the espagnole, the meat-glaze, the white broth and the turned mushrooms all exist elsewhere in the kitchen already, and the cook building this plate is drawing on them rather than making them. The cross-references to numbered recipes, which run to the hundreds in the book, are what make it a working manual for a professional kitchen rather than a domestic cookbook.