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Chicken Legs, Dijonnaise
Take up the chicken legs, etc., from the jar, from Thursday, and drain on a cloth. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in frying pan, add the legs and quickly fry them for five minutes on each side, remove and keep them on a plate till required. Pour the marinade in a saucepan, place pan on the open fire and let reduce to third the quantity, pour in two gills tomato sauce and gill demi-glace, then boil for five minutes. Strain sauce through Chinese strainer into another saucepan, add the chicken legs with twelve canned mushrooms, brown in a small frying pan twelve small onions with a tablespoon melted butter for six minutes or until or a nice golden colour, and then add to chicken. Lightly mix, cover the pan and set in the oven for forty-five minutes, remove, dress the chicken on a dish, pour contents of pan over, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
This is the second half of a two-day preparation: the legs were put down in a marinade earlier in the week, and the entry assumes you have the jar. Read it as a braise, not a fry.
- The missing first step"From the jar, from Thursday" refers back to an earlier entry in the book; the only thing this page tells us about it is that there is a marinade to be poured off. A red or white wine marinade with onion, carrot, bay, thyme and peppercorns will serve; hold it in the refrigerator, not a larder, and give it 24 hours rather than several days.
- Where the Dijon comes inThe name promises mustard, and the printed method never mentions it. A tablespoon or two of Dijon whisked into the strained sauce off the boil is what makes the dish answer to its title; added while boiling it loses its edge and can go grainy.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, four fluid ounces. So two gills tomato sauce is one cup, and a gill of demi-glace is half a cup.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced down. A cup of good dark chicken or veal stock reduced by half, with a small knob of butter beaten in at the end, stands in for it. Commercial glace de viande diluted to taste also works; jarred "brown gravy" does not.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve is fine; press the solids to get the body out of them.
- Open fireMeans the open top of the range, i.e. direct heat on the burner, as opposed to the oven. Nothing to do with wood.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Forty-five minutes of gentle braising on chicken legs points to a moderate oven, 350F, covered; the liquid should barely tremble.
- Onions and mushrooms"Twelve small onions" are pearl or boiling onions, peeled whole. Canned mushrooms were in common use in kitchens of this period and are already cooked, so they only need the braising time; if you use fresh, brown them with the onions first or they will water down the sauce.
- CroutonsBread cut into hearts and fried in clarified butter until crisp, set around the rim of the dish at the last moment. Placed early they go soft.
- YieldSix croutons and twelve onions suggest a dish for six as part of a longer menu; four as a main course.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alessandro Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York. The dish belongs to the French repertoire of the period, where a garnish or sauce named for a place was a fixed shorthand: dijonnaise means mustard, Dijon having been the centre of French mustard making since the Middle Ages and, by a tradition often repeated though hard to establish as history, the source of a sharp, verjuice- or wine-based style said to have displaced the coarser older sorts. The construction here is textbook Escoffier-era kitchen economy: a marinade is not thrown out but reduced and turned into the sauce base, stretched with tomato and demi-glace from the stockpot, then strained smooth. The heart-shaped croutons, the twelve glazed onions, the dusting of parsley are all standard finishing grammar of the time, and they tell you this was written for a cook working a brigade line with a stockpot already going, not for a household starting from nothing.