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Chicken Saute, Bordelaise
Cut the head and feet off a three-pound tender chicken, singe, draw, and wipe. Cut it into twelve even pieces and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat two tablespoons oil in a large frying pan, add the chicken with a bean sound garlic and briskly fry for eight minutes on each side; drain off the oil from the pan, remove the garlic, then add eight finely chopped shallots; stir well and cook for one minute, pour in a gill of claret, eight finely minced mushrooms, and let the wine reduce to half the quantity. Pour in one gill tomato sauce and a gill demi-glace, lightly mix and let slowly cook for thirty minutes more. Remove from the fire, dress the chicken on a hot dish, boil the sauce for five minutes more, add half an ounce good butter and half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, mix well, pour it over the chicken, decorate with six heart-shaped bread croutons and serve.
A straightforward French sauté that assumes a butcher's chicken and a stockpot of demi-glace already on hand. Most of the translation work is in the units and the two sauce bases.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe uses three of them: claret, tomato sauce and demi-glace, so half a cup of each.
- "A bean sound garlic"A typesetting mangle of a bean-sized piece of sound (unblemished) garlic — one clove, left whole so it can be fished out later. It is there to perfume the oil, not to be eaten.
- ClaretPeriod English for red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red works; the wine is reduced by half, so a drinkable one matters more than a fine one.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole (brown sauce) reduced down with brown stock, a professional kitchen staple in Filippini's day and a specialty purchase now. Good jarred demi-glace or a half cup of well-reduced brown chicken stock will carry the sauce.
- Cutting into twelveThe recipe specifies only twelve even pieces. One workable division: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and each breast half cut into three. A 3 lb bird jointed this way serves about four.
- Frying timeEight minutes a side over brisk heat both colours and largely cooks the pieces; they then finish in thirty minutes of slow cooking in the sauce. If your breast pieces are large, lift them out partway through the braise and return them at the end, or they may dry out.
- Drain the oil, keep the fondThe instruction to pour off the oil before the shallots go in is the hinge. The browned residue left in the pan is where the flavour lives; pour off fat only, and do not wipe the pan.
- Finishing butterHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, swirled in off the heat after the final boil. Returning the sauce to a hard boil afterwards risks separating it.
- CroutonsBread cut into hearts and fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp. Set them around the rim at the last moment so they stay dry.
"Bordelaise" in classical French cookery signals two things at once: red wine from Bordeaux and, in the strict sense, a sauce built on red wine, shallots and beef marrow bound with demi-glace. By the time the classical repertoire was codified, shallots and reduced claret were the identifying pair, and this chicken sautō is the domesticated version -- no marrow, but the shallots, the wine reduced by half, and the brown sauce all present. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) gathered a great many such restaurant preparations for American households, which explains the offhand call for a gill of demi-glace: he was writing out of a hotel kitchen tradition where the brown sauce was simply always there, simmering. The instruction to cut off the head and feet suggests a chicken that often arrived from the market whole and undrawn.