No. 1913

Chicken with Noodles, Macaroni, Ravioles, or Mirmidons-Braised

(Poulet Braise Soit aux Nouilles, Macaroni, Ravioles, ou Mirmidons).

Cook a chicken the same as with rice (No. 1914), roll out thin, some noodle paste bands (No. 142) two inches wide, cut it into fine shreds, plunge them into boiling, salted water and let cook for eight to ten minutes while covered; remove from the fire to drain on a sieve. Return these noodles when dry to the saucepan and add two or three spoonfuls of good bechamel (No. 409), fresh butter, grated parmesan, a bit of nutmeg and salt and pepper, then dress on a hot dish; lay the chicken on top either whole or neatly cut up, pour over its liquid reduced to a half-glaze and thickened with a little tomato sauce (No. 549). This chicken can be served exactly the same only substituting macaroni (No. 2960), ravioles (No. 2976), or mirmidons (No. 689).

← No. 1912 Chickens, English Style—Boiled Chicken No. 1914 Chicken with Rice—Braised →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so this entry is really an assembly instruction: a braised chicken set on buttered noodles with a reduced tomato-tinted glaze. Everything you need to know is in what the numbers stand for.

The missing recipeNo. 1914 is the braised chicken with rice, and this dish simply borrows its chicken. Cook until the thigh reads 165F. The braising liquid is the whole point of the dish, so do not discard it.
Noodle pasteNo. 142 is an egg-and-flour noodle dough, closer to fresh tagliatelle than to dried pasta. Rolled thin and shredded, fresh noodles are usually done in 2 to 3 minutes in boiling salted water, well short of the eight to ten the text specifies.
SpoonfulsA "spoonful" here is generally taken to mean a tablespoon. Two or three tablespoons of bechamel for a chicken's worth of noodles is meant to coat, not to sauce them; the dish should look glossy rather than creamy.
Half-glazeReduce the strained braising liquid by half until it coats a spoon, then whisk in a spoonful of tomato sauce. This is the hinge of the dish. Skim the fat before reducing or the glaze will break and slick the noodles.
MirmidonsNo. 689 in Ranhofer's own numbering, a small moulded paste garnish you will not find on a shelf today. Macaroni or ravioli are the practical substitutions, and the recipe explicitly permits both.
ParmesanBuy a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano and grate it yourself. Pre-grated cheese usually carries an anti-caking agent that will dull the bechamel and keep it from melting cleanly into the noodles.
YieldOne chicken with about 12 oz of fresh noodles serves four as a main course. Warm the serving dish thoroughly; a cold platter sets the butter and cheese into a paste almost immediately.

A Little History

This entry comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous reference book he compiled from three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Its structure explains the terseness: Ranhofer numbered some 3,500 preparations and expected a cook to hold several open at once, so a "recipe" is often just a route through the book. The dish itself is a French treatment of Italian materials, exactly the mixture Delmonico's traded on, and the fact that noodles, macaroni, ravioli and mirmidons are offered as interchangeable tells you they were understood as one category of garnish rather than as distinct dishes. "Mirmidon" is generally traced to the Myrmidons of Homer, applied in nineteenth-century French kitchens to small, numerous shapes of paste; the name went out with the technique, and the word survives now chiefly in books like this one.