No. 1901

Chickens a la Tunisian—Sauted

Poulets Sautes a la Tunisienne

Divide two two-pound chickens into five pieces each, range the pieces in a sautoir with half melted butter and half oil, saute on a moderate fire and then in the oven. When they are three-quarters cooked, season and finish, being careful to remove the fillets and other tender pieces as quickly as they get done; drain them all off, leaving only the fat in the sautoir, then pare the chickens piece by piece and range them at once in a low saucepan with a little clear gravy (No. 404) and meat glaze (No. 402); keep this in a warm place; fry two ounces of finely chopped onions in butter left from the chickens with the gizzards cooked and cut in small squares, the chopped up livers and four ounces of cold tenderloin of beef or lamb cut also into one-eighth inch squares, add salt, pepper and bread-crumbs and cool this off before breaking in a few raw egg-yolks. Form this preparation into five-eighths inch diameter balls and put them in with the chicken, also a quart of veloute (No. 415) and two gills of Madeira wine, let simmer and reduce the sauce, skimming off the fat. Dress the chickens in a pyramid form with the quenelles around, and cover over with a part of the sauce passed through a tammy, serving the remainder separately. Trim the pinion bones and drumsticks with paper frills (No. 10) and lay trussed crawfish all around.

← No. 1900 Chickens a la Stanley—Sauted Chicken No. 1902 Chickens Point du Jour—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stocks already made, so the work here is really three separate jobs: sauté and hold the chicken, build a forcemeat from the giblets, and finish everything in velouté. Read it through and set out the sauces before touching the birds.

The hinge: pull each piece as it finishesWings and breast fillets are done several minutes before the thighs and drumsticks, and Ranhofer says so explicitly. Everything is going back into sauce afterwards, so anything left in the pan "to be safe" will be dry by the time it reaches the table.
Two-pound chickensThese are small birds by current standards; a supermarket chicken runs 3.5-4.5 lb. Use two small fryers if you can get them, or one larger bird cut into eight and accept different proportions. "Five pieces each" is not spelled out; the usual French division of a bird into five is two legs, two wings with the breast fillet attached, and the carcass.
Sautoir and low saucepanA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the pieces in one layer and ovenproof. The "low saucepan" for holding is simply a shallow pan in which the chicken sits without steaming itself.
Moderate fire, then the ovenColour over medium heat on the stovetop, then finish uncovered in a moderate oven; Ranhofer gives no temperature. The oven is doing gentle even cooking, not browning.
PareIn Ranhofer's usage this means trimming each cooked piece neatly — removing loose skin, protruding bone ends and ragged edges — not peeling anything.
Gills, and the sauce quantitiesTwo gills is one cup of Madeira. A quart of velouté (No. 415) with a cup of wine is a great deal of sauce for two small birds; it is meant to reduce hard, and the recipe expects you to serve the surplus in a boat.
Clear gravy and meat glazeNo. 404 is a clear unthickened brown stock and No. 402 is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup. A few tablespoons of good reduced stock and a teaspoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate will stand in for both.
The giblet quenellesCool the mixture completely before the raw yolks go in, as written, or they will set and grain. Poach one test ball in the simmering sauce first: too little yolk and they fall apart, too much and they turn rubbery. They finish cooking in the velouté, so they must be at a true simmer for several minutes.
Frills and crawfishPaper frills on the drumsticks and a border of trussed crawfish are period plating, not flavour. Both can be dropped without harming the dish; if you keep the crawfish, cook them separately and use them whole.
YieldTen pieces of chicken plus quenelles serves four to six as a main course.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where the numbered cross-references to gravies, veloutés and paper frills functioned as a working kitchen manual rather than a home cookbook. The name is worth noting for what it does not contain: nineteenth-century French menu French attached "à la Tunisienne" fairly loosely to dishes, and here there is no harissa, no cumin, no couscous — only Madeira, velouté and a giblet forcemeat, which is to say a thoroughly Parisian sauté with a fashionable North African label. Such geographic titles were often a matter of garnish convention rather than provenance. The construction itself — sauté the bird, hold the pieces, build a sauce in the same pan, return everything to finish — is the classic poulet sauté method, and the use of gizzards, livers and leftover cold tenderloin in the quenelles shows a grand restaurant kitchen making use of the parts that came attached.