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Chicken, Haag
Singe, draw, cut the head and feet off and truss a fine tender chicken of three pounds. Place it in a saucepan with four quarts water, season with a tablespoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, add three branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bean garlic, two leeks, two branches celery, one bay leaf, one sprig thyme and two cloves. Cover the pan and boil for one hour and twenty-five minutes. Remove the chicken, place on a dish and keep hot. Strain the stock into another saucepan.
Boil three ounces of macaroni in salted water for forty minutes, drain, place in a vessel, mix in an ounce each grated Parmesan cheese and good butter and shuffle the pan. Pound in the mortar an ounce lean raw veal, three ounces lean raw bacon, finely hashed, and an egg yolk. Prepare a roux with one ounce butter and two ounces flour, then moisten with a quart of the chicken broth, mix well until it comes to a boil and let reduce for twenty minutes. Remove and let cool off. Gradually add the force. Season with half a teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding two egg yolks and briskly mix for five minutes. Lightly butter a two-quart pudding mould, line it all over with the macaroni and spread three-quarters of the force around the macaroni. Cut the chicken into small dice pieces, arrange them in the centre of the mould, place the balance of the force over and cover the mould, place it in a saucepan, pour in hot water to half the height of mould and set in the oven for one and a half hours. Remove, unmould on a hot dish, pour a Madeira sauce over and serve.
A macaroni-lined chicken timbale, steamed in a water bath and turned out whole — a Delmonico-era showpiece built from two separate operations, a poached fowl and a raw veal-and-bacon forcemeat. The hinge is the forcemeat: it must be folded into the cooled panade, not a warm one, or the yolks scramble and the mould weeps when unturned.
- "Force"Short for forcemeat — the pounded veal, bacon and yolk bound with the thick roux base. Modern kitchens do this in a food processor, working cold and in short pulses so the fat does not smear.
- A saltspoonRoughly 1/4 teaspoon. Both the cayenne and the nutmeg here are 1/4 teaspoon each; the cayenne is assertive against a bland farce, and that is deliberate.
- "One bean garlic"A single clove. The phrasing appears to follow the French gousse d'ail, though "bean" is a loose rendering rather than a literal one. Not a whole head.
- Oven temperatureNothing is stated. A bain-marie custard of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for the full hour and a half; the water in the outer pan should stay below a simmer or the forcemeat sets porous.
- The macaroniForty minutes suggests a thicker, coarser dried macaroni than we buy now, though the book does not describe it. Modern pasta needs 8-10 minutes, and for lining a mould you want it barely tender — it cooks again inside the timbale and will collapse into paste if pre-cooked soft.
- The chickenEighty-five minutes of hard boiling will overshoot a 3 lb bird badly. Bring the pot to a boil, drop to a bare simmer, and count on 50-60 minutes; the meat is diced and buried anyway, so dryness shows up as texture rather than colour.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. A little flat parsley with a pinch of tarragon reads closest; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- Lining the mouldButter the mould well, then coil the strands against the sides in overlapping rings, pressing them so no gaps remain — the forcemeat is spread against them and will leak through any bare patch. Chilling the lined mould for 20 minutes before filling makes this far easier.
- Yield and serviceA two-quart mould serves six to eight. Rest it 10 minutes out of the water bath before turning out, or the centre slumps. Madeira sauce is classically a brown sauce finished with Madeira; the recipe draws only a quart of the broth for the panade, leaving the rest of the pot over.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries hundreds of dishes tagged with proper names in exactly this way — a patron, a colleague, or an occasion, with no explanation offered. "Haag" is most likely such a dedication, though the book never says so and the person behind it is not recoverable; the German or Dutch flavour of the name fits a period when New York restaurant kitchens named plates after the men who ate at them regularly. The dish itself is straightforward French technique: a timbale or pain de volaille, in which cooked meat is set in a forcemeat inside a lined mould and cooked gently in a water bath so it can be turned out intact. Such moulded entrées were prized because they arrived at table as an object rather than a portion, and because they made a single boiled fowl stretch across eight covers.