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Chicken Saute, Hongroise
Cut head and feet off a tender Philadelphia chicken of three pounds, singe, draw and cut in twelve even pieces. Heat a tablespoon butter in a large frying pan, add chicken pieces one beside another and gently fry for five minutes on each side, turning once in a while. Dredge a tablespoon flour over, stir well, then pour in one and a half gills each milk and broth. Season with a level tablespoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, mix well two minutes, then slowly boil for thirty-five minutes. Lift up chicken with a fork and place in another frying pan, adding ten finely sliced mushrooms and two tablespoons sherry, lightly mix and cook for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with a half gill cream, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, and add to sauce. Sharply whisk while heating for five minutes, strain sauce through a cheesecloth over chicken, mix well. Dress chicken on a large dish, pour sauce over, arrange six timbales of rice around chicken and serve.
A classic French-method sauté with a Hungarian accent: paprika in the braise, an egg-and-cream liaison to finish. Most of the work is in the sauce, and the one place it can fail is the last step.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, the sauce must not boil. Whisk it over gentle heat until it coats a spoon, around 175–180F; a hard simmer will scramble the yolks and no amount of straining will fix the texture.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. One and a half gills each of milk and broth is 3/4 cup of each; the half gill of cream at the end is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the nutmeg here is a scant eighth.
- The salt is far too muchA level tablespoon of salt for a three-pound chicken and a cup and a half of liquid is roughly triple what a modern palate wants, especially with commercial broth. Start with a teaspoon of fine salt and correct at the end.
- "Philadelphia chicken"A market term of the period for a prime, plump young bird of the sort supplied to the Eastern cities; the "milk-fed" gloss often attached to Philadelphia poultry is trade lore rather than documented practice. Any good 3 lb chicken works; you will not need to singe, draw or remove the head and feet.
- Cutting in twelveTwo wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, each breast halved crosswise, and the back cut in two. Keep the pieces roughly even so they finish together.
- Cooking timeThirty-five minutes at a bare simmer is right for dark meat but will dry the breast. Pull the breast pieces at about 20 minutes, hold them warm, and return them when the mushrooms go in.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of true Hungarian sweet paprika, added to the fat rather than the liquid, gives far more colour and aroma than the pale supermarket tin. Do not let it scorch or it turns bitter.
- StrainingPressing the sauce through cheesecloth catches any bits of coagulated yolk and gives the glossy finish the dish is after. A fine chinois does the same job.
- Rice timbales and yieldPack cooked, buttered rice into six small buttered dariole moulds or ramekins, press firmly, and turn out around the platter. The recipe serves four to six.
À la hongroise in a professional kitchen of this era generally meant paprika and cream. The style was current in the grand hotel repertoire in the decades either side of 1900 — Escoffier's Guide Culinaire of 1903 gives hongroise preparations among its garnishes and sauces — and it spread as a way to give a plain sauté a fashionable national label, the same impulse that produced the parade of provençale, portugaise and polonaise dishes filling books of this kind. The dish is French in technique from start to finish: a sauté sealed in butter, a flour-thickened braise, and a yolk-and-cream liaison at the last moment. What marks the page as American is the bird. "Philadelphia chicken" was a genuine market designation for prime poultry raised for the Eastern cities — the milk-fed description usually attached to it is trade lore rather than documented feeding practice — and a cook writing here could assume a reader knew to ask for one by name at the butcher, undrawn and with head and feet still on.