No. 1895

Chickens a la Montesquieu—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Montesquieu

By observing the drawing for this entree the elegance of this new style of dressing can easily be perceived. On an entree dish one inch from the edge fasten a standing open work border made of cooked paste (Fig. 3), spreading it out slightly; brush this over with egg-yolks and dry it in the air. In the center of this border, fasten a wooden bottom to be covered with the same paste rolled out very thin. Singe three clean chickens, detach the legs, leaving on as much skin as possible, then lift off the large fillets with the pinions leaving the minion fillets adhere to the breasts, remove the skin from four of the large fillets, pare and lard with fine larding pork (No. 4, Fig. 52), range them in a sautoir lined with fat pork, salt and pour butter over. Detach the minion fillets from the breasts, trim four of them, cut five gashes on their top, into these place rounds of truffles, laying them in a buttered sautoir. Bone the legs, pare the meats evenly, salt and stuff them with a rather firm quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) into which mix some truffled Duxelle (No. 385); sew them up and range them in a sautoir, covering over with fat pork and basting with some stock (No. 194a); cook very slowly, then drain and let to get cold under the pressure of a light weight. With the remaining large fillets and the minion fillets prepare a little cream forcemeat (No. 75) and with it fill a small, plain pyramidical mold flat on top; poach this in a bain-marie for ten minutes; cut the stuffed legs in two and return them to the sautoir with their stock reduced to a half-glaze, heat up slowly while basting at the oven door; glaze the larded fillets in a hot oven and poach the streaked minion fillets. At the last moment unmold the crouton of forcemeat on the paste-covered dish; dress the legs around, one overlapping the other, pour over a little good reduced veloute sauce (No. 415), and then range the four large fillets intercalating them with the streaked fillets; on top of the pyramid insert a small skewer garnished with truffles (Fig. 11). Surround the border with a chain of round, peeled truffles cooked just when needed with glaze (No. 402) and Madeira and send with the entree a sauce-boatful of veloute sauce reduced with the truffle broth.

← No. 1894 Chickens a la Maryland—Sauted Chicken No. 1896 Chickens a la Nantaise—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a set piece from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen rather than a weeknight chicken dish: three birds are broken down into four separate preparations and reassembled on a decorative stand. Read it as an assembly plan, and note that almost nothing in it is actually sautéed.

The hinge: everything is cooked separately, then married hotThe stuffed legs are braised, weighted cold, halved and reheated in their reduced stock; the larded fillets are glazed in a hot oven; the studded tenders are poached; the forcemeat pyramid is poached in a bain-marie. Nothing is plated until the last minute, and the legs are pressed cold so that they cut cleanly. Work backward from a single service time or the components will not arrive together.
Butchery vocabularyThe large fillets are the breast halves, the minion fillets are the tenders lying beneath them, and the pinion is the wing joint left attached for looks. Three birds give six of each; only four large fillets and four minion fillets are dressed, and the surplus goes into the forcemeat, which is how the recipe balances. The legs are all boned and stuffed.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan with a lid, not a sloped skillet. Any wide, heavy-bottomed sauté pan or braiser that can go from stovetop to oven will do.
Larding pork and fat porkLarding means threading strips of firm back fat through the lean breast with a larding needle, a tool now rare outside restaurant supply. Fat pork used to line the pan and cover the legs is sheet fatback or thinly sliced unsmoked pork belly, used as a moisture blanket; modern barding fat or thin-sliced pancetta serves the same purpose, though cured fat will add salt.
Oven temperaturesGlazing the larded fillets in a "hot oven" means something in the region of 400-450F, and briefly -- the point is to set and brown the glaze, not to cook the breast through. Poultry is safe at 165F; the legs, being braised, want to go past that to about 175F for tenderness.
The paste border is not foodThe standing openwork border and the sheet covering the wooden base are made of a stiff display paste, egg-washed and air-dried purely as architecture rather than as something to eat. A modern cook can substitute a shallow footed platter and skip the joinery entirely without losing anything edible.
The cross-referencesRanhofer's numbers point elsewhere in The Epicurean: No. 89 and No. 75 are quenelle and cream forcemeats (pounded raw poultry sieved with egg white and cream, essentially a mousseline), No. 385 is duxelles, No. 415 velouté, No. 402 meat glaze, No. 194a a light stock. Without those pages the recipe cannot be followed; a modern mousseline forcemeat and a chicken velouté stand in for the two that matter most.
Poaching the forcemeatTen minutes in a bain-marie suits a small mold only. Judge by internal temperature — around 160F — and let it rest a minute before unmolding, or the pyramid will slump on the platter.
TrufflesThe recipe assumes fresh black truffles by the handful, both sliced into the tenders and turned into round balls for the border chain. At current prices this is the single largest cost in the dish. Sliced preserved truffle in the fillets and a good truffle-scented reduction in the velouté carry most of the effect.
YieldThree chickens, served as one course among many in a long menu, would probably stretch to eight or ten; as a main course for a modern table, figure six to eight.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the entire repertoire — some 3,500 numbered items keyed to one another, with plates showing how each should look on the dish. This entry is characteristic of the book's most ambitious register: a garnished entrée built on a paste-and-wood stand, illustrated by a figure the reader is told to consult, and named for a French grandee in the way that nineteenth-century haute cuisine named dishes for Soubise, Colbert or Richelieu. The Montesquieu attribution is decorative rather than documentary; there is no evidence the eighteenth-century philosophe or his family had anything to do with the composition, and Ranhofer himself calls it a "new style of dressing." What the recipe really records is the economy of a brigade kitchen — one man boning legs, another larding, another at the mortar for forcemeat — and a service culture in which a single entrée on a raised border was expected to sit among a dozen other courses.