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Chicken Legs with Risotto
Remove second joint bones of the six chicken legs saved from last Sunday and season all over with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon oil or butter in a sautoire, place legs in one beside another, gently cook for five minutes on each side, then add a finely chopped onion, and cook for four minutes longer. Pour in a gill claret and let reduce to half the quantity, then pour in one and a half gills tomato sauce and half teaspoon chopped parsley, mix well, cover pan and cook for fifteen minutes. Prepare a Piedmontaise risotto, but without the sausage. Dress it on a dome-shaped hot dish, arrange legs around base of rice, pour sauce over and serve.
A tidy piece of restaurant economy: the legs left over when breasts were used earlier in the week, braised in red wine and tomato and set around a mound of saffron risotto. Most of the work is in reading the old vocabulary correctly.
- "Second joint" and the state of the meatThe second joint is the thigh; the instruction is to bone the thigh, leaving the drumstick attached. The five-minutes-a-side browning and fifteen-minute braise fit raw legs better than reheated roast, though the recipe says only that the legs were "saved from last Sunday" and does not state whether they were cooked.
- A gillHalf a cup. So a gill of claret is 1/2 cup, and one and a half gills of tomato sauce is 3/4 cup.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan wide enough to hold six legs in a single layer without crowding. A heavy 12-inch skillet with a lid does the same job; if the legs overlap they steam rather than brown.
- ClaretPeriod English for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works. Reducing it by half before the tomato goes in is what keeps the sauce from tasting raw and sharp.
- Tomato sauceThe book means its own cooked tomato sauce — tomatoes simmered with aromatics and usually thickened with a light roux — not pasta sauce or ketchup. Canned crushed tomatoes cooked down with a little stock stand in acceptably.
- DonenessFifteen minutes covered is enough for boned thighs but tight for bone-in legs. Take the thickest part of the thigh to 175F; dark meat is better slightly past the minimum, where the connective tissue has softened.
- Risotto PiedmontaiseThe recipe's own wording shows the full version contains sausage, omitted here. Classical risotto a la piemontaise is short-grain rice cooked in broth and finished with butter and Parmesan; whether this book's version also carries saffron would need checking against its own risotto entry. Cook it to the point where it still spreads slowly, then let it firm a minute before mounding -- the dome shape depends on a risotto that is not soupy.
- YieldSix legs serve three generously, four if the risotto is plentiful. Season the rice separately; the teaspoon of salt in the recipe is for the chicken alone.
The book is Alexander Filippini's, and Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, which shows in the framing: this is a professional's answer to what becomes of the legs when the breasts have already been served. Risotto alla piemontese — rice cooked in broth, finished with butter and Parmesan — appears in this collection, and the recipe's back-reference to "last Sunday" points to a day-by-day menu structure. The pairing of a red-wine-and-tomato braise with saffron rice is closer to Milanese and Piedmontese practice than to anything French, though the method of browning, deglazing with claret and finishing in a covered pan is straight out of the classical brigade repertoire Filippini worked in.