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Chicken Saute, Souvenir
Singe, cut off heads and feet of two one-and-a-half-pound spring chickens, remove legs, wings, breasts, and second joint bones from legs, season with a light teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a sautoire, arrange in legs and breasts one beside another and gently fry for five minutes on each side. Cut in julienne shape the rind of half a sound orange, twelve canned mushrooms and three canned sweet Spanish red peppers and add to chicken. Pour in a gill white wine, gently mix, let sauce reduce on fire to one-third the quantity, then add two gills tomato sauce, with twelve tarragon leaves, lightly mix and cook fifteen minutes, carefully shuffling pan once in a while. Dress chicken on a hot dish, boil sauce on fire for five minutes and pour over it, sprinkle a little finely chopped fresh parsley on top and serve.
A quick French-style sauté in the hotel manner, built in one pan and finished with a wine-and-tomato reduction. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and ingredients need translating.
- A gillHalf a cup. So half a cup of white wine, then a full cup of tomato sauce added after the wine has reduced.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, wide enough to hold the pieces in a single layer without crowding. A 12-inch skillet does the job; two pans are better than a heap in one.
- The chickensTwo 1.5-lb spring chickens means very young birds. Use one 3-lb chicken cut into eight pieces, or four bone-in thighs and two split breasts. The instruction to remove the leg and second-joint bones is optional boning for neat service; skin-on, bone-in pieces are more forgiving of the timing.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockFive minutes a side plus fifteen in the sauce will finish small young birds but not modern supermarket pieces. Take breasts to 165F and dark meat to 175F, and pull the breasts out first if they run ahead.
- Orange rindPeel the zest in strips with a vegetable peeler and cut it into fine julienne, taking no white pith, which turns the reduction bitter. Half an orange's worth is plenty for four.
- Canned sweet Spanish red peppersPimientos, drained; piquillos or roasted red peppers from a jar are a fair substitute. Raw bell pepper is a poorer stand-in, as it will not take on the same soft, cooked texture in the time given.
- Tomato sauceA cooked tomato sauce rather than a seasoned pasta sauce. Use something plain, unsweetened and unherbed so the tarragon and orange stay audible.
- TarragonTwelve fresh leaves, added whole with the tomato. Dried tarragon is a different and duller thing; if it is all you have, use a small pinch and add it with the wine.
- YieldServes four as written, with rice, plain boiled potatoes or bread to take up the sauce.
"Souvenir" belongs to the long list of proper-noun garnish names that filled hotel and restaurant menus around 1900, when a sauté was a sauté and the name signalled which few ingredients had been dropped into the pan: here orange zest, mushrooms, Spanish peppers, white wine, tomato and tarragon. The method itself is the classic poulet sauté of French professional kitchens, colored by the Mediterranean pantry that American cooks of the period reached through cans. The reliance on canned mushrooms and canned pimientos is the period's real signature: both are often said to have become dependable commercial goods around this time, and cookbooks of the day used them freely where an earlier generation would have waited for a season.