No. 1976

Pullet a la Martiniere

Poularde a la Martiniere

Poeler a pullet very white (No. 12); drain and cut it up into eight pieces; dress them simply on a force-meat ring poached on the dish; surround with a circle of medium-sized poached spoon quenelles (No. 155), and cover the chicken and quenelles with good veloute sauce (No. 415), reduced with mushroom peelings, and finished with a little good cream. Serve the remainder of the sauce separately with very small and very white mushrooms added.

← No. 1975 Pullet a la Lester Wallack Capon & Pullet No. 1977 Pullet a la Mornay →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Delmonico's assembly entry rather than a standalone recipe: nearly every element points to another number in the book. Read it as a plating scheme built on four separate preparations — a pot-roasted bird, a forcemeat ring, quenelles, and a velouté.

Poêler, not roastPoêler, not roast -- To poêler is to cook the bird covered in butter over a bed of aromatic vegetables and pork or veal trimmings, basting throughout, in a moderate oven. The point of "very white" is that it must never colour: keep it covered, keep the butter from browning, and do not finish with a high-heat blast.
What a pullet isA young hen, not yet fully mature, of a few pounds dressed. A supermarket roasting chicken of similar weight is the practical stand-in; the flesh will be slightly less firm but behaves the same way.
The forcemeat ringA ring of veal or chicken forcemeat, poached gently on the serving dish itself as the text specifies, there to hold the carved bird. Keep the poaching gentle — at a hard simmer the panada weeps and the ring collapses. If you cannot manage the ring, a border of duchesse potato piped and lightly dried in the oven does the same structural job.
Spoon quenellesForcemeat shaped between two dessertspoons and poached in barely trembling salted water or light stock, never at a boil, or they burst. "Medium-sized" here means about the volume of a dessertspoon; enough to ring the dish.
Mushroom peelingsRanhofer means literally the skins and stalk trimmings, simmered in the velouté and then strained out; they give perfume without darkening the sauce. Whole sliced mushrooms will grey the velouté, which defeats the whole white scheme.
Reducing and finishingReduce the velouté with the peelings, then strain. Add the cream at the end and keep the sauce below a rolling boil thereafter.
The garnish mushroomsButton mushrooms turned or left whole and cooked in water with a little lemon juice and butter, the classic method for keeping them white. Cooking them separately keeps both them and the sauce pale.
Carving and yield"Cut it up into eight pieces" is the standard French break-down: two wings, two thighs, two drumsticks, the breast in two. A 3-4 lb bird with the quenelles serves four generously.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows exactly how such a book worked in a professional kitchen: it is a set of coordinates rather than a recipe, assuming the cook already has velouté, forcemeat and a poêling stock in hand. The Capon and Pullet section runs to dozens of these variations, each distinguished less by cooking method than by garnish and name — many of them, like the Lester Wallack immediately preceding, honouring patrons, actors and society figures of the day. The origin of "à la Martinière" is not documented in the book itself; the suffix generally marks either a person or a place, and Ranhofer, like his contemporaries, attached such names freely without explanation. What the dish records is the late nineteenth-century restaurant ideal of the all-white entrée: pale bird, pale quenelles, pale mushrooms, pale sauce, with every step in the process bent toward keeping colour out.