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Chicken Saute, Mexicaine
Singe, cut head and feet off a tender two-and-a-half-pound chicken, draw, cut it in twelve even pieces, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Place in a sautoir two tablespoons good olive oil or two tablespoons melted butter, add one bean garlic, heat oil on fire until garlic obtains a dark colour, remove garlic, then place chicken in pan and cook for six minutes on each side.
Cut a good-sized white onion and thick, seeded green pepper in half-inch pieces, add them to chicken, stir well and fry for ten minutes, tossing quite frequently meanwhile. Add two peeled, finely crushed, fresh tomatoes, mix well again, cover pan, set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, dress chicken and ingredients on a hot dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward sauté that assumes a bird bought whole and undressed, and an oven whose temperature the cook judged by hand. Two numbers need supplying: the pan heat and the oven.
- Buying the birdSingeing, drawing and removing head and feet are done for you now. Ask for a 2.5–3 lb chicken cut into 12 pieces, or joint it yourself: 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings, each breast cut into 3.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow, with a lid — not a saucepan and not a deep casserole. It must be ovenproof, since the dish finishes in the oven. A 12-inch skillet works.
- A bean of garlicOne clove. It is used to perfume the fat and then discarded; take it out as soon as it is deep brown, because a clove left to blacken turns the oil bitter.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Something around 375F for the covered 20 minutes should be enough to finish the thighs at 165F internal.
- Watch the breast piecesSix minutes a side in the pan plus ten with the vegetables plus twenty in the oven is a long haul for breast meat; birds sold today are generally younger and tend to cook faster. Pull the breast pieces out when they reach 165F and return them to the dish at the end.
- The peppers"Thick, seeded green pepper" means a fleshy bell pepper, not a chile. One large pepper and one large onion, both in half-inch dice.
- TomatoesTwo peeled and crushed fresh tomatoes come to roughly a cup. Out of season, a cup of drained canned tomatoes gives a better result than pale winter fruit.
- YieldThree to four servings. Rice or bread is wanted to catch the pan juices; the recipe supplies none.
Filippini is generally associated with Delmonico's in New York, and his International Cook Book gives dishes national labels in a way that says more about turn-of-the-century restaurant menus than about national cooking. "Mexicaine" here is a kitchen label, not a claim of authenticity: in the French professional vocabulary of the period, a garnish of onion, sweet pepper and tomato seems to have attracted national names loosely, with the pepper doing most of the work of identification. Sweet peppers and tomatoes had both crossed from the Americas to Europe centuries earlier and come back as French technique; what arrives on the plate is closer to a Basque piperade than to anything cooked in Mexico. The method itself — brown, add aromatics, moisten, finish covered in the oven — is the standard sauté of the classical repertoire, and Filippini repeats it throughout the book with the garnish swapped out.