No. 1899

Chickens a la Sanford—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Sanford

Draw and singe small one pound and a quarter to one pound and a half chickens, divide them into four pieces, suppressing the legs above the joint, also the pinion of the wings; season with salt and pepper, and rub over with flour; they may now be if so desired dipped in eggs and in bread-crumbs; saute them slowly in clarified butter, and when well done drain and dress; pour a little good gravy (No. 404) in the dish and garnish around with hollow tartlets filled up with Chantilly sauce a la Sanford (No. 588).

← No. 1898 Chickens a la Portugaise—Sauted Chicken No. 1900 Chickens a la Stanley—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

A plain butter sauté of very small chickens, made distinctive only by its garnish. Everything hinges on the birds being small enough to cook through in a pan without drying, and on the cream sauce being finished at the last moment.

The birdsA 1¼–1½ lb chicken is a poussin or a Cornish game hen, not a modern broiler. Buy game hens or spatchcocks in that weight range; a 4 lb supermarket bird cut in four will scorch on the outside long before the thigh is done.
"Draw and singe"Drawing is removing the innards, singeing is burning off the pinfeathers over a flame. Both are done for you now; a quick pass with tweezers over the wings and thighs is all that is left.
Butchery terms"Suppressing the legs above the joint" means cutting away the lower leg at the joint; the "pinion" is the wing tip, sometimes taken to include the outer two segments. Both are trimmed off, leaving four tidy pieces.
Clarified butterWhole butter burns at sauté heat because of its milk solids. Clarify it, or use ghee. Keep the pan at a steady medium; the recipe's "slowly" suits a coating that needs to set and colour while the meat cooks through.
Doneness"Well done" here means cooked, not overcooked. Take the thigh to 165°F; on birds this size that is roughly 12–18 minutes total, turning once. Breaded pieces need the same internal reading, so watch the crust colour and lower the heat if it runs ahead.
The two cross-referencesNo. 404 is Ranhofer's gravy, which the reader is meant to have to hand; a well-reduced brown chicken stock, lightly thickened, stands in for it. No. 588 is his Chantilly sauce, apparently a white sauce lightened with whipped cream: whatever the base, the cream must be folded in off the heat and the sauce served immediately or it will thin and separate.
Tartlets"Hollow tartlets" are blind-baked unsweetened short pastry or puff shells, small enough to ring the dish. Bake and cool them ahead, fill only as the plates go out, or the pastry softens.
YieldThe original gives none. One bird divided in four serves one generously or two lightly; count four tartlets per bird.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is full of dishes carrying the names of patrons, performers and public figures of the period — Sanford here is almost certainly one of them, though the book, characteristically, does not say who. The structure is more revealing than the name: a sauté of small chickens was one of the à la minute restaurant treatments for poultry, fast enough to cook to order, and what distinguished one version from the next was the garnish rather than the bird. A brown gravy under the chicken with pastry shells of whipped-cream sauce around it is characteristic late-nineteenth-century service. The Chantilly sauce — savoury velouté lightened with whipped cream, named by analogy with the sweetened cream generally traced to the château of Chantilly — belongs to the same fashion for cream-enriched white sauces that produced the many suprême and allemande variants filling the sauce chapter of this book.