No. 1903

Chickens, Hunter's Style—Sauted

Poulets Sautes au Chasseur

Pick out three good chickens of about two and a half pounds each, draw, singe, then clean well and extract all the small pin feathers, cut them each up into seven pieces, the two wings, two legs, two pieces of the back and one of the breast bone; season with salt and pepper; melt six ounces of butter in a sautoir until it becomes a fine golden color, then lay in the pieces of chicken and toss them well; when they acquire a fine light brown on one side, turn them over to brown likewise on the other, cover the sautoir and finish cooking on a very slow fire or in the oven. When the meats are well done, drain off the butter and detach the glaze with a little stock (No. 194a). Fry colorless in butter a large pinch of chopped shallot, moisten with half a bottleful of red or white Burgundy wine, reduce to half, then add a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414) and simmer the whole for a few moments, season well, and when the sauce is properly reduced, return the chickens to it, put it back on the fire to remove at the first boil and add three ounces of cooked, lean ham cut up in one-eighth of an inch squares, slice three onions across, having them two inches in diameter by three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness, remove the largest rings and roll them in flour, then fry a few at the time in plenty of fat; dress the chickens and use these rings to garnish the top, decorate the stumps of the legs and the pinions with paper frills (No. 10) and serve immediately.

← No. 1902 Chickens Point du Jour—Sauted Chicken No. 1904 Chickens, Parisian Style—Sauted →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method is sound and needs almost no adjustment; what it needs is translation. Two of his ingredients are cross-references to other pages of The Epicurean, and the whole dish stands or falls on the sauce.

Espagnole sauceNo. 414 is Ranhofer's brown mother sauce: a brown roux moistened with stock, simmered and skimmed at length. A pint of it is a day's work in itself. A well-reduced homemade brown stock thickened lightly with beurre manié, or a good demi-glace loosened with stock, will carry the dish; a bouillon cube will not.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. Any heavy skillet or braiser large enough to hold twenty-one pieces of chicken in one layer works. Crowding steams the skin and you lose the browning the recipe is built on.
Three chickens of two and a half poundsThat is about 7½ lb of bird, serving eight to twelve. Modern supermarket chickens run 3-4 lb, so two birds cut into eight pieces each gets you close. Small birds cook faster than large ones; check at the thigh joint.
The slow finishAfter browning, the covered pan should hold the chicken at a bare simmer, not a boil. Ranhofer gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven of around 300-325F for 20-30 minutes, until the thigh reads 175F, will do it. Breast pieces are done sooner and can be lifted out early.
Deglazing is the hinge"Detach the glaze with a little stock" means the browned film in the pan is the flavour of the dish. Pour off the butter, then scrape the fond up with stock while the pan is still hot, and add that liquid to the sauce.
Half a bottleful of BurgundyAbout 12 fl oz. Reduced by half with the shallot, it should smell sweet rather than sharp before the espagnole goes in. Red gives a darker, more robust sauce; white keeps it lighter, and both are authentic here.
Returning the chicken"Remove at the first boil" is deliberate. The chicken is already cooked; it goes back only long enough to heat through and take the sauce. Longer simmering dries the breast and dulls the wine.
The onion ringsSlices about 3/16 inch thick, floured and deep-fried in batches so the fat stays hot. Fry them last and drain on paper, or they soften on the platter.
Paper frillsPurely decorative cuffs for the exposed leg and wing bones, standard in nineteenth-century service. Skip them without loss.

A Little History

Chasseur—hunter's style—is one of the fixed garnishes of French classical cooking: shallots, white or red wine, brown sauce, and in most versions mushrooms, the whole thing meant to suggest what a hunting party could assemble from a pan and a bottle. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York across two separate terms of service, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working record of that kitchen, and its chicken chapter runs to dozens of sautés distinguished only by their garnish; the numbered cross-references to stock and espagnole are how the book keeps each entry short. Ranhofer's version is unusual in leaving out the mushrooms and substituting diced lean ham and fried onion rings. The insistence on cutting each bird into exactly seven pieces, and on onion slices measured to the sixteenth of an inch, is characteristic of the book throughout.