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Chicken Braise, Santiago
Cut off the head and feet of a tender three-pound chicken. Singe, draw and truss, cover with very thin slices larding pork and firmly tie around with string. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, place in a roasting pan, set in a brisk oven to roast for twenty minutes and turn once in a while, then remove. Heat in a saucepan two tablespoons oil, add two seeded green peppers cut into quarters, one small peeled and finely sliced Bermuda onion, three red sweet peppers cut in halves and one bean sound garlic. Lay the chicken over the vegetables, add three peeled, crushed red tomatoes, a half pint white broth, one and a half gills demi-glace and a saltspoon of diluted saffron. Cover the pan and set in oven for forty-five minutes. Remove, dress the chicken on a large dish, untie, remove the lard and untruss. Skim the fat from the surface of the sauce, add a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, boil for five minutes, pour the contents of the pan over the chicken and serve.
A hotel-kitchen braise built on two French props — barding fat and demi-glace — over a Spanish base of peppers, tomato and saffron. Most of the work is translating the old measures and knowing which oven setting is meant when.
- Oven temperaturesA "brisk" oven is usually taken as around 400–425F for the initial twenty-minute browning. The recipe specifies no setting for the covered braise that follows; moderate heat, around 350F, is the usual modern reading, since sustained high heat would reduce the sauce hard and dry the breast.
- Gills, pints and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is about ¾ cup. A half pint of white broth is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon — here of saffron already steeped in a little warm liquid, not dry threads.
- White brothThis means an unbrowned chicken or veal stock, pale rather than roasted. Any light unsalted chicken stock works; avoid dark beef stock, which will fight the saffron.
- Demi-glaceIn 1906 this meant espagnole simmered with brown stock and reduced, a sauce base kept on hand in professional kitchens. Reduced brown stock, or a good commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to ¾ cup, is the practical substitute. It is what gives the sauce body; plain stock alone will stay thinner.
- Larding porkThin sheets of pork back fat or unsmoked salt pork tied over the breast — barding, not larding. Blanch salt pork first if it is heavily cured, or the finished sauce will be too salty once reduced. Untie and discard it before saucing, as directed.
- "One bean sound garlic"A single sound clove of garlic, left whole. Fish it out before serving if you like; the original leaves it in the sauce.
- DonenessA three-pound bird trussed and covered will take roughly the stated time, but check the thigh joint reads 165F. Rest it while you skim and finish the sauce.
- Finishing the sauceSkim seriously — barding fat plus two tablespoons oil leaves a slick. Five minutes at a boil is what the recipe calls for.
- YieldServes four as written, with the peppers and onion carried over from the pan as garnish.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a volume advertising over 3,300 recipes drawn from his years at Delmonico's in New York, and it seems to show a habit of hanging a city's name on a dish to signal its flavour rather than its provenance. "Santiago" here means Spanish and Spanish-American: green and red sweet peppers, tomato, garlic, onion and saffron ecognised as Iberian, whether he had Chile, Cuba or Galicia in mind. Underneath, the method is entirely French, with the bird barded and trussed, browned hard, then braised in a covered pan on a bed of vegetables and finished with demi-glace from the sauce station. That layering is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking of the period: a classical technique applied to a foreign palette, then named for somewhere far away. The saffron "diluted" before use may be a small mark of a working kitchen, where steeping threads in advance would let the colour run evenly through a sauce instead of streaking it.