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Chicken Legs, Devilled with Bacon
Procure three small, tender spring chickens of one and a half pounds each. Cut off the legs and breasts without detaching the small filets from the breasts. Cut off the feet and bones at the second joint of the six legs, remove all the breast bones and cut the wings at the middle joints. Place the six legs on a plate, season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and then rub well with a tablespoon oil. Arrange on a double broiler and broil for six minutes on each side. Remove. Have a devilled butter on a plate; roll each leg in the butter, then in fresh bread crumbs; replace on the broiler and broil for four minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish. Arrange six thin slices broiled bacon over the legs and serve.
Place the breasts in a stone jar with two gills white wine, one gill water, half sliced carrot, half sliced onion, one branch celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bay leaf and one clove. Season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; mix well, cover the jar, and keep it in a cool place until Sunday.
N. B. Neatly clean all the remaining bones and keep separately for Sunday.
The broiled legs themselves are a straightforward piece of Delmonico's-era work, but the recipe ends by telling you to hold raw chicken breasts in a crock of wine, in "a cool place," for several days. That instruction belongs to a world of cold larders and ice chests and cannot be followed now.
- Why the cautionRaw poultry held at larder temperature for days is a straightforward Salmonella and Campylobacter risk; wine is not an acid strong enough or a preservative reliable enough to control it. If you want to marinate and keep chicken breasts, use a current recipe with measured refrigeration times.
- The legs are the dishThe devilled legs and bacon are complete in themselves and read as written. The breast and bone instructions are housekeeping for a later meal in the book's menu cycle, not part of this plate.
- DonenessSix minutes a side, then four more a side, is about right in a hot broiler for small legs, but broiling of this period was judged by eye. The safe minimum for poultry is 165F at the thickest part next to the bone; dark meat is often taken nearer 175F and stays juicy.
- Double broilerThis is a hinged wire broiling grid or basket that clamps the meat between two frames, used over coals or under a salamander. A rack set close under a modern broiler element, or a grill, does the same job.
- Devilled butterThe recipe assumes you already know it: softened butter worked with dry or prepared mustard, cayenne, a little Worcestershire, salt. It is the coating that makes the crumbs stick and does most of the seasoning.
- Crumbs and heatFresh crumbs over butter scorch fast. Move the pan a rung lower for the second broiling, or the coating blackens before the second four minutes are up.
- Gills and chervilA gill is half a cup, so two gills of wine is one cup and one gill of water is half a cup. Fresh chervil is a specialty-market herb now; a little tarragon plus extra parsley is the usual stand-in.
- YieldSix legs and six slices of bacon: three to six servings depending on whether the plate is a first course or a supper.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the books that carry his name are organized the way a professional caterer thinks: not as a list of dishes but as a calendar of meals, with each day's cooking feeding into the next. That is what the closing lines here are about. Three spring chickens are broken down at once, the legs go straight to the broiler for today, the breasts are laid down in wine and aromatics for a later meal, and the picked bones are set aside for Sunday. Devilling, meanwhile, is an English idea generally traced to the turn of the nineteenth century — the culinary sense of the word is attested only from the late 1700s into the early 1800s — and it came into American hotel cooking wholesale: mustard and cayenne worked into butter, spread over something already part-cooked, then crumbed and browned. It was often used on the second-best parts of a bird or the remains of a joint, and the bacon laid over the top is pure chophouse practice, adding salt and fat to lean meat that has been cooked over dry heat.