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Broiled Chicken with Mushrooms
Singe, cut head and feet from a tender three-pound chicken. Split through back without separating, remove spine bone, draw and wipe dry, take out breast bone and neatly flatten it, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then rub it well all over with tablespoon oil. Arrange on a double broiler and gently broil eight minutes on each side, then set in oven ten minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish, squeeze juice of quarter of a lemon over and keep hot. Place twelve sliced canned mushrooms in a saucepan with two tablespoons sherry and one and a half gills demi-glace, let boil ten minutes, pour sauce over chicken and serve.
A spatchcocked broiler finished in the oven and sauced with sherry and demi-glace — hotel cooking scaled to a home range. Two things need translation: the vessel called a double broiler, and the gills of demi-glace.
- The hinged broilerA "double broiler" is a two-sided wire grill that clamps the flattened bird between its halves so it can be turned as one piece over the fire. A heavy rack under a gas broiler, or a grill with a weighted pan on top, does the same job; the point is even contact and one clean flip.
- Gills and the sauceA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is three-quarters of a cup of demi-glace, boiled with two tablespoons of sherry. Ten minutes at a boil will reduce and thicken it, though how far depends on the width of your pan; judge it by how it coats rather than by the clock.
- Demi-glaceIn 1906 this meant brown veal stock reduced with espagnole sauce over the better part of a day. A good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a hard-reduced brown stock is the practical substitute; plain canned broth will not coat.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A hot oven, around 425F, is a reasonable choice for the finishing ten minutes: the broiling has already coloured the skin, and the oven is only there to carry the heat through the thigh.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockEight minutes a side plus ten in the oven is optimistic for a three-pound bird. Take the thigh to 165F at the bone; flattening helps, but thickness varies and the sauce hides no rawness.
- Removing the bonesCut down either side of the spine and lift it out, then press the breast flat and pull the keel bone free with your fingers. Taking the keel out is what lets the bird lie genuinely flat.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were a common convenience in kitchens of this period. Fresh cremini, sliced and sauteed in butter until browned before the sherry goes in, give more flavour; add them to the reducing sauce rather than boiling them raw in it.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper on a three-pound bird is about right for the meat, but commercial demi-glace concentrates are usually salty. Taste the sauce before it goes over.
- YieldTwo generous portions, three modest ones. Carve the bird into halves or quarters on the hot dish before saucing.
The International Cook Book (1906) is generally associated with Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this dish shows the house style plainly: French method, American bird, a sauce built on the brown stock that every professional kitchen of the period kept going as a matter of course. Broiled chicken was the standard quick order of the grill room — a young bird of two to three pounds, split and flattened so it cooked in minutes rather than the hour a roast demanded — and the distinction between a "broiler," a "roaster" and a "fowl" was a real one at the market, describing age and toughness rather than size alone. What lifts it out of chophouse territory is the demi-glace, which was far more a hotel kitchen's stock-in-trade than a home cook's; recipes like this one quietly assume a larder that a domestic kitchen was unlikely to keep, which is why the sauce is the part a modern cook has to solve first.