No. 2371

Chicken Tart or Pie a la Rigolo

Tarte de Poulet a la Rigolo

Cut up a pound and a half young chicken into four pieces, bone these and season with salt and pepper; saute them colorless in butter with fresh mushrooms and a tablespoonful of onion, each chopped up separately; when the whole is fried add a tablespoonful of flour, mix well and moisten with stock (No. 194a); boil, skim and simmer until thoroughly cooked, then add some imitation cocks'-combs made of beef's palate and cocks' kidneys, a broiled sliced sausage having the skin removed and the gizzard cooked and cut in quarter-inch squares, seasoning with salt, pepper and chopped parsley. Make a few quenelles with the chopped chicken livers, season well and mix in some bread-crumbs and raw egg-yolk; roll this preparation into balls, three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Fill a deep pie dish (Fig. 183) with the above chicken stew, dropping the balls among it, also some small hard-boiled egg-yolk balls; finish the pie the same as pie a la Manhattan (No. 2370).

← No. 2370 Chicken Tart or Pie a la Manhattan Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2372 Chicken Tart or Pie, Australian Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's chicken pie is a fricassee under a pastry lid, and the whole point of it is a collection of garnishes that a modern butcher will not have on hand. Everything here is workable if you decide early what you are actually going to put in the dish.

The hinge: saute colorless"Saute them colorless" means cook the seasoned chicken in butter over gentle heat so it stiffens and turns opaque without taking on any brown. Browning muddies the pale ivory sauce this dish depends on; keep the pan below the point where the butter starts to color.
Stock No. 194aThe cross-reference is to Ranhofer's stock section; whatever its exact composition there, an unsalted light chicken stock does the same job here. Add it a ladle at a time to the flour-coated chicken so the sauce stays smooth.
Cocks' combs, kidneys and palateCombs and cocks' kidneys (understood in period usage as the testes) were common Victorian garnishes and are effectively unobtainable now; beef palate, cut and scored to imitate a comb, is the substitute Ranhofer names here. Palate itself requires long blanching and simmering to become tender. All three can be left out, leaning on the mushrooms, sausage and quenelles instead.
The gizzardGizzards must be simmered until tender on their own — 45 minutes to an hour in stock — before being diced into the quarter-inch squares called for. Added raw to the stew they will stay rubbery.
Liver quenellesChopped chicken livers bound with breadcrumbs and raw yolk are a very soft mixture; chill it thoroughly before rolling the three-quarter-inch balls, and test one in simmering stock. If it disintegrates, work in more crumbs rather than more egg, which turns them tough.
Egg-yolk ballsThe recipe asks only for "small hard-boiled egg-yolk balls" and gives no method; hard-boiled yolks worked into small balls will do. They go in whole, dropped among the stew rather than stirred through.
Finishing as No. 2370Follow the Manhattan pie for closing the dish with paste and baking it. The filling is already fully cooked, so you are only baking the pastry: a hot oven until the crust is set and colored. Let the stew cool before the lid goes on or it will slump the paste.
YieldA pound and a half of chicken plus the garnishes fills one deep pie dish; figure on three or four modest portions, or rather more as the entree course it was written for.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a run of chicken pies — Manhattan, Rigolo, Australian style — that shows how a restaurant kitchen spun variations off a single technique. The garnish list is the tell: combs, cocks' kidneys, beef palate and gizzard were the small offal that a professional kitchen breaking down whole birds and whole animals had to hand daily, and using them was thrift as much as luxury. "Rigolo" is French slang for funny or droll, and Ranhofer, like many chefs of his generation, attached such names freely to house creations without explanation; no documented origin for this particular title survives. What the recipe records is a moment when American fine dining was French in vocabulary and technique but built on whatever the market delivered — hence the substitution of scored beef palate for real cockscombs, written into the recipe as though it were the normal thing to do, which by then it was.