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Chicken Saute, Chasseur
Singe a tender chicken of two and a half pounds. Cut it into twelve pieces. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat well in a frying pan two tablespoons olive oil; add the chicken, the pieces one beside the other, and briskly fry for six minutes on each side; remove all the white meat from the pan, keeping it warm, and slowly fry the legs for five minutes longer. Add the white meat again to the dark. Slice very fine six sound shallots and half ounce lean, raw ham and add to the chicken. Toss all well and cook for two minutes, moisten with two tablespoons sherry, half gill tomato sauce and one gill half glaze, adding eight sliced canned mushrooms. Cover the pan and let slowly cook for ten minutes. Pour into a hot dish, arrange six pieces heart-shaped bread croutons around the chicken, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A classic French sauté that depends on two things the original assumes you have on hand: a jar of meat glaze and a pan wide enough to hold twelve pieces of chicken without crowding.
- "Half glaze" is demi-glaceOne gill of half glaze means 1/2 cup of demi-glace — brown stock reduced with a little tomato and thickened, sold in tubs and concentrated pots today. If you substitute plain chicken stock the sauce will not have the body or gloss the dish is named for; reduce a cup of strong brown stock to a scant half cup instead.
- GillsA gill is 1/2 cup, so half a gill of tomato sauce is 1/4 cup and one gill of glaze is 1/2 cup. Two tablespoons of sherry is meant to be dry, not cream sherry.
- Singeing and cutting upSingeing over a flame burned off pinfeathers on a bird that arrived less thoroughly plucked than yours will. Skip it. Twelve pieces from a 2 1/2 lb bird would be something like the two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and each breast half cut into three — small enough to cook through in the time given.
- The pan matters more than the timingSix minutes a side over brisk heat is meant to build a deep brown crust that flavors the sauce; that only happens if the pieces sit in one layer with space between them. Use a 12-inch skillet, or brown in two batches, and add a little butter to the olive oil for color.
- Check the temperature, not the clockThe white meat is pulled early and returned later precisely because it overcooks. With modern birds, take breast pieces out at 160F and dark meat to 175F; the ten-minute covered simmer at the end will finish anything slightly underdone.
- Mushrooms and hamCanned mushrooms were common in kitchens of this period; 8 sliced fresh cremini, browned separately, work well here. The half ounce of lean raw ham is a seasoning, not a filling — prosciutto or unsmoked pancetta, minced fine.
- ShallotsModern shallots are often large; three is usually plenty for the six called for. They should soften, not brown, in the two minutes given.
- CroutonsHeart-shaped croutons are white bread trimmed with a knife and fried in clarified butter until crisp. Fry them while the chicken simmers and set them around the dish at the last moment so they stay dry.
- YieldA 2 1/2 lb bird with this much sauce serves three, four if there is rice or potato alongside.
Chasseur is French for hunter, and the sauce — shallots, mushrooms, white wine or sherry, tomato, and reduced brown stock — belongs to the family of quick pan sauces that turn the fond left by a sauté into a finished dish. It is generally traced to the professional repertoire of the later nineteenth century, where the same treatment was applied to chicken, veal kidneys, rabbit and game; the hunter's association is traditional rather than literal, the notion being of woodland mushrooms and a sauce made fast over a small fire. Its appearance here, complete with a casual instruction to have half glaze and tomato sauce ready, is a sign of the book's origins in restaurant cooking: these were mise en place that any professional kitchen kept simmering all day, and the recipe simply assumes them. For a domestic cook of the period, tracking down demi-glace was the real work of the dish.