Home › The World's Kitchen › Broiled Spring Chicken on Toast
Broiled Spring Chicken on Toast
Cut off the necks and legs up to the first joint and split open through the back two very tender spring chickens of one and a quarter pounds each; draw, remove the breast bones, neatly wipe. Season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Lightly oil them with a tablespoon oil. Arrange on a double broiler and broil for ten minutes on each side. Remove. Place six freshly prepared toasts on a large, hot dish, lay the chickens over the toast, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over them, decorate with a little watercress and serve.
A spatchcocked bird under direct heat, finished with parsley-lemon butter. The whole dish turns on the size of the chicken: 1¼ lb birds are what we would call poussin, and the ten-minutes-a-side timing only works at that weight.
- The bird"Spring chicken" here means a very young bird of about 1¼ lb; the nearest things sold today are poussin or Cornish game hen. Note the recipe states the weight before the birds are drawn, so the dressed weight is a little under that. A standard 3½–4 lb supermarket chicken split down the back will not cook through in twenty minutes; expect 35–45 minutes, or buy the small birds.
- The hinge: finish by temperatureSplit birds cook unevenly, and a fixed ten-minutes-a-side assumes one particular size of bird at one particular heat. Check the thickest part of the thigh for 165F/74C before it goes on the toast, and give it a few more minutes bone-side to the heat if it is short.
- "Double broiler"A hinged wire basket that clamps the bird flat between two grids and can be flipped whole over live coals. Under a modern overhead broiler, set the rack about 5 inches from the element and lay the chicken skin-side down first; on a grill, cook over medium coals, skin-side up to start, and weight it with a foil-wrapped brick.
- Removing the breast bonesAfter splitting through the back, work out the keel and rib bones with a small knife so each half lies genuinely flat. This is what makes twenty minutes enough, and it is the step most likely to be skipped.
- Maître d'hôtel butterNot spelled out here, as was usual for a standard preparation: softened butter beaten with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, in the region of 4 tablespoons butter to a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of juice. Chill it and slice it over the hot birds so it melts into the toast.
- Seasoning quantitiesA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of white pepper for two small birds is on the assertive side by modern taste, though it is seasoning skin and cavity both. The butter carries more salt as well, so it is reasonable to hold some back.
- YieldTwo 1¼ lb birds split in half give four portions; the six toasts in the original suggest a table where each half was cut down further, or where the toast was passed as much as eaten. Four slices of firm white bread, toasted at the last moment, is the practical version.
- ServingThe watercress is not decoration alone — its pepperiness is the counterweight to the butter. Dress it with nothing, or a few drops of lemon, and put it on the dish only as it goes to the table.
Broiled spring chicken on toast was a fixture of American hotel and club menus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the format here — split bird, flat broiler, compound butter, watercress, a slice of toast to catch the juices — is straight out of the professional repertoire that Alexander Filippini and his contemporaries codified for the dining rooms of New York. The dish depended on a seasonal supply that has since vanished: before year-round confinement rearing, very young chickens were genuinely a spring product, and "spring chicken" on a bill of fare meant a small tender bird priced accordingly. Maître d'hôtel butter, generally traced to the French restaurant kitchens of the nineteenth century, was the standard finish for anything grilled or broiled, and its presence in a book called The International Cook Book marks how completely French technique had become the default professional language of the American hotel kitchen, whatever the nationality claimed by the recipe's title.