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Chicken Saute, Parmentier
Singe, cut head and feet off a tender two-and-a-half-pound chicken, draw, neatly wipe and cut twelve even pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a sautoire, arrange in the chicken, season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, and gently brown ten minutes on each side. Add one ounce ham cut in small squares, six small chopped shallots, and brown five minutes. Remove butter from bottom (and save it). Pour a gill white wine on the chicken and let reduce on fire until nearly dry, then add two gills demi-glace, six sliced, canned mushrooms, juice of quarter of a lemon, half a bean sound, chopped garlic, half teaspoon finely chopped parsley and half teaspoon chopped chives. Mix well. Cover sautoire and cook for fifteen minutes. Dress chicken on a large dish, pour sauce over, arrange a potato noisette around the chicken and serve.
A straightforward French sauté in the classical idiom: brown the bird, build a pan sauce, garnish with potatoes. Most of the work of translating it is vocabulary rather than technique.
- Buy the chicken jointedSingeing, drawing and removing head and feet are all done for you now. Ask for a 2.5 lb bird cut into twelve pieces, or cut it yourself: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and each breast halved into three, bone in.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold all twelve pieces in one layer with room for them to brown rather than steam. A 12-inch skillet with a lid works.
- A gillHalf a cup. So a gill of white wine is 4 fl oz and two gills of demi-glace is one cup.
- "Half a bean sound, chopped garlic""bean" is this book's usual word for a garlic clove, and "sound" means unblemished. Read it as half a clove, finely chopped, which is a deliberately faint background note, not a garlic dish.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened and glossy. Good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced brown chicken stock will carry the sauce; plain broth will not, and the finished dish will be thin and grey.
- Twenty minutes of browning is too muchTen minutes a side over the heat needed to colour a small bird will dry the breast before the fifteen-minute braise even starts. Brown in batches to a good deep colour, five to seven minutes a side, and add the breast pieces back later if you want them juicy.
- Canned mushroomsStandard in professional kitchens of the period and part of its flavour, but fresh cremini sliced and browned in the reserved butter give a better sauce. Add them with the demi-glace.
- Potato noisettePotatoes cut into small balls with a melon baller and cooked in butter until golden, seasoned and drained. The potato garnish is what earns the dish its Parmentier name, though the classical Parmentier garnish is usually diced potato rather than scooped balls; a handful of small roasted potatoes stands in adequately.
- Seasoning and yieldA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper on a 2.5 lb bird is reasonable, but the ham and demi-glace both bring salt, so hold some back and correct at the end. Serves three, four if the potatoes are generous.
The tag Parmentier on a French menu means one thing: potatoes. It honours Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century French pharmacist and agronomist who campaigned to persuade a suspicious public that the potato was fit for people rather than only for livestock, and by the nineteenth century his name had hardened into kitchen shorthand attached to soups, garnishes and hashes built on the tuber. The recipe itself is textbook poulet sauté of the Escoffier era: pieces browned in butter, the fat poured off and saved, the pan deglazed with white wine, and the sauce finished with demi-glace and fine herbs — a method that depends entirely on a house stock pot simmering somewhere out of sight. That it appears here at all reflects the book's origins in the great American hotel and restaurant kitchens of the turn of the century, where French nomenclature was the professional language and a garnish name told the cook exactly what to put on the plate.