No. 2469

Chicken Roasted with Jelly, Cut Up and Garnished with Tongue

Poulet Roti a la Gelee, Decoupe et Garni de Langue de Boeuf

Roasted with Jelly.-Select a fine two pound and a half to three pound chicken; it must be very tender; draw, singe and free it of all the pin feathers, then truss it to roast (No. 179); cover with a bard of thin fat pork, then roast it on the spit, basting it frequently, and when done and of a fine color, remove and let it get cold. Untruss and glaze with chicken glaze (No. 397), and surround it with chopped jelly and jelly croutons, cut either into triangles, oblongs, lozenges, etc.

Cut up and Garnished with Salted Unsmoked Beef. Tongue.-After the chicken has been cooked and is cold, the same as for the above, cut it up into five pieces, pare them nicely and glaze over. Cut from the thick part of a tongue some slices three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness; pare them into oblongs three inches long by one and three-quarters wide, and cover well with half-set jelly. Dress the chicken around an upright conical support placed in the middle of a dish, having it covered with green butter (No. 583); decorate around with chopped jelly, and over this place the oblongs of tongue in a circle, one overlapping the other. On top of the support have some ornamental piece, either a figure or a cup filled with jelly cut in squares of an eighth of an inch. This dish can be accompanied by a separate remoulade sauce (No. 624).

← No. 2468 Chickens Sauted a la Sherman The Cold Service No. 2470 Cream of Lobster →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a spit, a stock pot of chicken glaze already in the larder, and a pastry-room stock of aspic. The dish is entirely make-ahead, and the only real difficulty is keeping everything cold enough that the jelly stays crisp.

The hinge: everything must be thoroughly coldGlaze and aspic will not set on a bird that is even faintly warm, and a coated chicken left at room temperature will weep and slide. Chill the roasted bird overnight, work quickly on a cold platter, and return the dish to the refrigerator between each stage of decoration.
Spit to ovenA 2.5 to 3 lb chicken roasts well at 425F for about an hour, or start at 425F for 15 minutes and drop to 375F. Take it to 165F in the thigh; carryover is irrelevant here since the bird is being cooled anyway.
Barding porkA "bard of thin fat pork" is a sheet of fatback or unsmoked salt pork tied over the breast. Sliced pancetta or fatback from a butcher works; ordinary streaky bacon adds smoke the dish does not want.
Chicken glazeRanhofer's No. 397 is glace de volaille: chicken stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets to a rubbery block when cold. Warm a spoonful to brushing consistency and apply in thin coats. A commercial glace de volaille or heavily reduced unsalted stock stands in.
Jelly means aspicThe "jelly" throughout is clarified savoury aspic, not fruit jelly. Chopped jelly is set aspic diced with a wet knife; croutons are aspic cut into geometric shapes. "Half-set" is the point where it coats a spoon and mounds slightly, roughly the texture of raw egg white.
Salted unsmoked tongueThis is corned or pickled beef tongue, not the smoked kind. It needs simmering three to four hours until a skewer slides in easily, then peeling while hot and pressing under a weight overnight so the slices cut cleanly at the specified three-sixteenths of an inch.
Green butterNo. 583 is butter pounded with blanched spinach or herbs and sieved. The text says the item is "covered with green butter", most likely the conical support, though the wording could equally refer to the dish. Either way it is decorative masking, not a sauce.
The supportThe "upright conical support" is a socle, originally carved rice paste, tallow or bread. A cone of styrofoam or a small inverted bowl, masked and never eaten, does the same job; simply mounding the chicken pieces on a platter loses nothing but the height.
Cutting into fiveThe book does not say which five. The usual division would be two legs, two wings and the breast, with the wings sometimes taking a portion of breast with them. Pare the cut edges square before glazing so the coating sets in an even skin.
YieldFive pieces, so four to five as a cold luncheon course, with the remoulade (No. 624, a mustard-based mayonnaise) passed separately.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that kitchen's repertoire in one volume, cross-referenced by number like an engineering manual. This entry belongs to the cold service, the buffet cookery of the late nineteenth century, where aspic did the work that photography does now: a glazed bird surrounded by cut jelly and overlapping ovals of tongue was meant to be looked at from across a room. The pairing of poultry and salted tongue is older than the presentation, tongue being one of the standard cold cuts of the period and its deep pink a deliberate contrast to pale glazed chicken. The socle topped with an ornamental figure marks the dish as belonging to the grande cuisine tradition inherited from Car u00eame, where the cold table was a place for architecture; it is often said that by the 1920s Escoffier's followers were already arguing that most of it should come off the plate.