No. 2391

Tourte of Chicken

Tourte de Poulet

Divide two small chickens into eight pieces each, suppressing all the bones. Melt in a sautoir three or four spoonfuls of chopped fat pork; add to it a quarter of a pound of bacon cut in large dice and fry these for four or five minutes; lift them out with a skimmer, leaving the fat in the sautoir, and into it put three spoonfuls of chopped shallot and onion; fry colorless, then add double the same quantity of chopped mushrooms, and as soon as these have evaporated their humidity, put in the chickens, a bunch of parsley and aromatic herbs; fry together and at the end of ten minutes put back the bacon, and when the meats are half cooked moisten with half a glassful of dry white wine; let reduce quickly to a glaze and pour over two or three spoonfuls of half-glaze sauce, then take out the meats and let get cold. Prepare about a pound of chicken godiveau (No. 82). Lay on a pie dish (Fig. 183) a rather thick layer of foundation paste (No. 135), having it eight inches in diameter; in the center spread a layer of the chicken godiveau six and a half inches in diameter; on this place the chickens, dressing them in a dome, and adding a few cooked mushrooms; then cover the entire dome with the remainder of the godiveau; wet the lower flat at the base of the dome and cover over with a large layer of puff paste (No. 146), press it on to the lower one and fasten the two together, decreasing the thickness, then cut very round. Wet the top layer and lay on the free surface around the dome a band of puff paste made in six turns, having it three-eighths of an inch thick; fasten the two ends, cut bias together, and wet this over; decorate the dome with fanciful cuts of paste, egg it over, as well as the bands of puff paste, and cook the tart in a moderate oven for forty minutes. After taking it out slip it on to a large dish and cut off one-third of the top of the dome to open it, and pour in a few spoonfuls of half-glaze sauce (No. 413), having more in a sauce-boat, and adding to it a few cooked mushrooms. Pigeon or rabbit tarts can be prepared the same.

← No. 2390 Tourte of Palate of Beef, Parisian Style Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2392 Tourte of Fillets of Soles a la Financiere →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade and a cross-referenced book, so half the work here sits in the numbered recipes he points to. Read it as a two-day project: braise and cool the chicken one day, build and bake the next.

The hinge: cool the filling completelyThe chicken and bacon must be stone cold, and the reduced sauce set, before any pastry touches them. Warm filling melts the butter out of the puff paste and the dome collapses into a grey, sodden mass.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's "spoonful" is generally read as a tablespoon. "Half a glassful" of white wine works out at roughly 4 fl oz if a glass is taken as 8. A quarter pound of bacon is 4 oz, and the recipe specifies large dice.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, not a deep pot. A 10- or 12-inch skillet with a lid does the same job; you want surface area so the mushrooms dry out rather than stew.
Godiveau (No. 82)A fine forcemeat: pounded meat worked with fat, egg and cream and then sieved. Check No. 82 for Ranhofer's exact chicken version. A food processor does quickly what a mortar and sieve did slowly. Season it assertively and poach a teaspoon to check before committing a pound of it.
Half-glaze sauceDemi-glace, No. 413: espagnole reduced with brown stock. A well-reduced brown chicken or veal stock, thickened lightly, stands in. It needs to be thick enough to coat, since a thin sauce will soak the base.
The two pastesFoundation paste (No. 135) is a sturdy short lining dough, closer to a pate a foncer than to modern pie crust; the top is puff paste (No. 146), and the band laid around the dome is the piece Ranhofer specifies as made in six turns. Do not use puff for the base, which must hold a heavy dome without tearing.
Moderate ovenRanhofer gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Forty minutes browns and cooks through a filling that is already cooked; if the pastry colours too fast, tent the dome with foil rather than dropping the heat, since the base needs the bottom heat to set.
Birds and yield"Two small chickens" presumably means birds of around 2 to 2.5 lb each; boned out they will yield considerably less than their dressed weight in meat. The finished tourte will serve perhaps six to eight as an entree, with the extra demi-glace and mushrooms passed separately.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down in print, which is why entries like this one read as instructions to a cook who already knows what a godiveau is. A tourte is simply a round covered pie or tart, and the dish belongs to a long line of banquet pastries in which meat is masked in forcemeat so that the whole thing can be sliced without falling apart. The final gesture of cutting the lid off at table and pouring sauce into the opening is pure service-room theatre of the period, and the closing line offering pigeon or rabbit as substitutes suggests that both were probably ordinary market birds and meats in nineteenth-century New York rather than the specialities they have become.