No. 2372

Chicken Tart or Pie, Australian Style

Tarte de Poulet a l'Australienne

Singe, draw and cleanse well some young chickens, cut them up into eight pieces: two wings, two thighs, two backs and two breastbones; fry these colorless in butter, moisten with stock (No. 194a), season and cook slowly while covered; remoisten several times, then add some allemande sauce (No. 407); garnish the bottom of a pie dish (Fig. 193) with slices of fried ham, lay the chicken on top, intercalating the pieces with small hard-boiled egg-yolks, chopped-up raw mushrooms and fine herbs; pour the sauce over and cover with a layer of chicken forcemeat (No. 73). Make a flat of puff paste parings, lay it over the top, pinch the edges, egg the surface twice and decorate with puff paste leaves; bake the pie in a hot oven for thirty to forty minutes.

← No. 2371 Chicken Tart or Pie a la Rigolo Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2373 Lamb Minion Fillet Tart or Pie a la Manning →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock, allemande and forcemeat already standing by, so the work here is mostly assembly. Read the cross-references as a shopping list before you start.

"Singe, draw and cleanse"This assumes a bird bought with pinfeathers and innards intact; a chicken from a butcher needs only jointing. Ranhofer does not say how many birds or what size they should be; the eight-piece cut he describes gives two wings, two thighs, two back sections and the breast split in two.
Fry colorlessCook in butter over moderate heat without letting the skin brown. The pie is meant to be pale and creamy under a golden crust, and browning at this stage muddies the allemande.
Stock No. 194a and allemande No. 407The stock called for is presumably a white stock rather than a brown one, though the number is not reproduced here. Allemande is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and a squeeze of lemon; it must not boil after the liaison goes in or it will curdle. Any good velouté enriched the same way will serve.
Chicken forcemeat No. 73A quenelle-type forcemeat of pounded raw chicken; the numbered recipe is not reproduced here, but forcemeats of this class are generally bound with panada, butter and egg white. A food processor does the pounding; keep everything cold or it will break. It goes on raw and cooks through under the crust.
"Small hard-boiled egg-yolks"Most likely whole yolks from hard-cooked eggs tucked between the pieces of chicken, since "chopped-up" attaches to the mushrooms rather than to the yolks; the whites are not used. Ranhofer gives no quantity.
Puff paste paringsTrimmings left from cutting other pastry, re-rolled. Rough-puff or a sheet of bought all-butter puff is the practical equivalent. "Egg the surface twice" means two thin coats of beaten egg wash, the second after the first has dried, which is what gives the deep gloss.
Hot ovenRanhofer gives no figure; a "hot oven" of this period is roughly 400-425F. Thirty to forty minutes at that heat sets the crust and cooks the raw forcemeat through; the chicken beneath is already cooked.
YieldThe recipe states neither the number of birds nor the number of portions; a standard pie dish of this kind would serve six to eight as a main course. The fried ham at the bottom flavours the dish and keeps the meat off the hot dish base.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The "Australian style" label belongs to a nineteenth-century French kitchen convention of attaching national or personal names to garnishes and constructions, and such names rarely record any real culinary geography; what it may gesture at is the British colonial hot raised chicken pie, layered with ham and egg, which Ranhofer has rebuilt in French terms with velouté, allemande and a quenelle forcemeat. Hard-boiled yolks and ham buried in a chicken pie are an old English habit found in eighteenth-century receipt books, and the combination survived into the Victorian picnic pie. What is characteristic of Ranhofer is the cross-referencing: the recipe runs to only a few lines because three other numbered preparations are doing the work, a structure that made the book usable in a professional kitchen and nearly unusable in a domestic one.