No. 2458

Chaudfroid of Pullet, Plain

Chaudfroid de Poularde, Simple

Draw, clean and truss two pullets of two pounds each as for an entree (No. 178); put them into a saucepan and cover with stock (No. 194a), adding a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf; boil, skim and cook slowly on the side of the fire until done, then transfer them to a vessel and pour the stock over; let get partly cold and drain off to cut into pieces, first removing the two legs and from them suppressing the second joint bones, retaining only the drumstick bones to answer for holding the frill; put these legs under the pressure of a weight, then begin to cut the fillets from the breast, leaving on a piece of the bone with the breast meat; pare the whole well free of all skin and sinews; dip all the pieces into a partly cold white chaudfroid sauce (No. 596), lifting them out with a large fork to range on top of a baking sheet, or else a heavy sheet of tin, one beside the other but without touching; a grate may be used. Set on ice to harden the sauce, then remove each piece and pare, trimming off the surplus chaudfroid sauce and giving them a handsome shape. Dress in a pyramid and cover the chaudfroid with half-set jelly applied with a brush; keep on ice for twenty minutes, then trim the pinion bones and drumsticks with fancy paper frills (No. 10) and decorate the dish and chickens with chopped jelly and jelly croutons.

← No. 2457 Chaudfroid of Prairie Hen-Grouse The Cold Service No. 2459 Chaudfroid of Quails a la Baudy →

For the Modern Kitchen

A cold-buffet showpiece built on three components Ranhofer numbers elsewhere in the book: a white stock, a chaudfroid sauce, and an aspic jelly. The work is mostly patience and temperature control rather than cooking.

The hinge: sauce temperatureThe chaudfroid must be "partly cold" — thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and cling, but still pourable. Too warm and it runs off in streaks; too cool and it sets in lumps. Keep the bowl over a pan of tepid water and stir it back to consistency between dips.
PulletsA pullet is a young hen under a year old. Two-pound birds are smaller than a standard supermarket roasting chicken; two Cornish game hens (1.25-1.5 lb each) or one 3.5 lb chicken cut down come closest. Larger birds give fillets too thick to look right in a pyramid.
"Cook slowly on the side of the fire"A bare simmer at the edge of the range, with no more than a tremble at the surface. Poached this way a small bird takes roughly 30-40 minutes; the breast should reach 165F. Hard boiling shreds the fibre and the pared fillets will not hold a clean edge.
Cooling in the stockPouring the stock back over the birds and letting them cool partly in it keeps the meat moist and seasons it through. Do not let this stage drift: get the pot into an ice bath or the refrigerator rather than leaving it out on the counter for hours.
The chaudfroid sauceNo. 596 is the book's white chaudfroid, a velouté- or béchamel-type sauce set with aspic jelly — essentially a sauce that firms to a sliceable coating when chilled. A workable modern equivalent is thick velouté loosened with strong chicken aspic, strained through a fine chinois so the surface dries glassy.
Half-set jelly and chopped jelly"Half-set" means aspic taken to the point where it is syrupy and just beginning to hold — brushed on, it gives the gloss. The chopped jelly and croutons are firm aspic turned out, diced, and cut into triangles or diamonds for the border.
Pressing the legsBoning out the second joint and weighting the leg flattens it into a neat, even shape that takes the sauce cleanly. A small plate with a can on top, in the refrigerator, does the job.
Paper frillsNo. 10 is the book's pattern for cut-paper frills slipped over the exposed drumstick and wing-pinion bones. Purely decorative, and entirely optional now; the bones were left in mainly to carry them.
Yield and holdingTwo small birds dressed this way serve six to eight as part of a cold table. Assemble the day you serve, keep it refrigerated until the last moment, and do not leave the finished dish out for more than two hours — aspic and poached poultry at room temperature are a poor combination.

A Little History

Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — names a technique rather than a dish: meat or poultry cooked hot, then masked in a sauce that is served cold and set. The origin is generally traced in French kitchen lore to an eighteenth-century banquet where a fricassée had to be eaten cold and was found better for it, though the story is traditional rather than documented. By the time Charles Ranhofer was running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, chaudfroid had become one of the fixed forms of the cold buffet, and The Epicurean (1894) gives dozens of them — grouse, quail, snipe, sweetbreads, foie gras. This one is labelled simple because the pieces are merely coated and glazed, with no truffle cutouts or piped decoration. The whole genre depended on cheap natural gelatine from long-simmered stock and on the ice that a large commercial kitchen could keep year-round, and it faded from home cooking as both the labour and the cold larder became harder to justify.