Home › The World's Kitchen › Chicken Saute, Morgan
Chicken Saute, Morgan
Singe, cut off head and feet of a two-and-a-half-pound tender chicken, draw, neatly wipe, cut in twelve even pieces, place on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and turn pieces well in seasoning. Thoroughly heat two and a half tablespoons melted butter in a sautoire, arrange in pieces of chicken one beside another and gently cook for six minutes on each side. Lift up pieces with a fork, place on a plate, add two tablespoons flour to pan, briskly stir and pour in two gills milk. Season with three saltspoons salt, a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, sharply mix until it comes to a boil, add chicken with six sliced mushrooms, one sliced truffle, let gently cook for twenty minutes, then place in a deep dish. Dilute on a plate one egg yolk, a half gill cream, two tablespoons sherry and the juice of a quarter lemon. Add to sauce, sharply whisk while cooking for five minutes, strain sauce through a Chinese strainer over chicken and serve.
A straightforward sauté in a cream sauce finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Nothing here is difficult, but the last five minutes decide whether the sauce is velvety or scrambled.
- The hinge: the liaison must not boilOnce the yolk, cream, sherry and lemon go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. Hold it at roughly 175-180F, whisking, for the five minutes given; at a boil the yolk curdles and no amount of straining will smooth it.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of milk is one cup and a half gill of cream is a quarter cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the sauce seasoning three-quarters teaspoon salt plus a quarter teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg.
- Sautoire and Chinese strainerA sautoire is a wide straight-sided sauté pan; anything heavy with a broad base works. A Chinese strainer is a chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve does the same job.
- Buy the bird dressedSingeing, drawing and removing head and feet are done for you. Ask for a 2.5 lb chicken cut into twelve: two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, each breast in two, and the back divided in two.
- Truffle and mushroomsOne sliced truffle was an ordinary garnish in a hotel kitchen of this period and is not now. A teaspoon of truffle paste or a few drops of truffle oil stirred in off the heat gets the perfume; leaving it out entirely gives a good creamed chicken. Use six brown or button mushrooms, sliced.
- Straining the sauceAs written the sauce is strained over the chicken, which means the mushrooms and truffle are caught in the chinois. If you want them on the plate, pick them out of the strainer and scatter them back over, or skip the straining and simply whisk the sauce smooth.
- Cooking timesSix minutes a side gives colour, not doneness; the twenty minutes in the sauce finishes the job. Check the thickest thigh reads 165F before the liaison goes in, since the sauce will never get hot enough afterwards to cook raw chicken.
- YieldA 2.5 lb bird in this quantity of sauce serves three, or four with rice, noodles or boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries the habit of that trade: hundreds of dishes distinguished from one another chiefly by a garnish and a surname. Chicken sauté appears in the book many times over, and the appended names — Morgan among them — are generally understood as tributes to patrons and to fellow professionals rather than records of who invented anything. The dish itself is standard French hotel practice of the period: brown the pieces in butter, build a velouté-style sauce in the same pan, finish with a liaison of yolk and cream sharpened with sherry and lemon. The truffle is the tell. In a New York restaurant kitchen around 1900 it was a routine line item, sliced over things the way a modern kitchen scatters herbs, and its presence marks this as a recipe written for cooks with a supply house behind them rather than for a household budget.