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Chicken Saute with Tarragon
Cut off the head and feet of a tender three-pound chicken. Singe, draw and cut in twelve even pieces, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and keep on a plate. Pick leaves off two branches tarragon, place them in a saucepan and keep branches separately.
Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add chicken and gently brown for twelve minutes, turning pieces once in a while; add the tarragon branches, six finely sliced shallots, two ounces raw lean ham cut in small pieces, a half bean garlic, one branch each parsley and chervil. Mix all well and brown five minutes, moisten with a gill white wine and two gills demi-glace, mix well and let slowly cook thirty minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile. Pick up chicken with a fork and place in a saucepan with the tarragon leaves, strain sauce on the chicken, lightly mix, cook five minutes more, dress chicken on a hot dish and serve.
A classic French sauté that assumes you have a stockpot of demi-glace on hand and a whole bird to break down yourself. Both are easily worked around.
- Buy the bird dressed"Singe, draw and cut in twelve even pieces" means plucking stubble over a flame and removing the innards, neither of which applies to a supermarket chicken. Ask for a 3 lb bird cut into twelve: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and each breast cut into three.
- A gill is half a cupSo the wine is 1/2 cup and the demi-glace is 1 cup. Those two gills of demi-glace are the whole point of the sauce and its main cost.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole (brown sauce) combined with brown stock and reduced by half. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate works; failing that, use 1 cup of well-reduced brown chicken or veal stock, which will be thinner but honest. Stock cubes risk making the finished sauce salty against the ham.
- "Half bean garlic"Almost certainly a clove, not a head; the odd wording probably reflects a translation of the French gousse (pod). The dish is meant to taste of tarragon and shallot, with garlic well in the background.
- Two lots of tarragon, on purposeThe bare stems go into the pan early to perfume the sauce and are strained out; the picked leaves go in only at the very end, for the final five minutes of cooking. Tarragon's anise note is volatile and fades with long cooking, so do not shortcut this by throwing it all in at once.
- The ham"Raw lean ham" means unsmoked cured ham — prosciutto, jambon de Bayonne or similar. Smoked bacon or ham will bully the tarragon. Two ounces is about two thin slices, cut into small dice.
- ChervilStill sold fresh in some markets and easy to grow, but often unobtainable. Leave it out rather than substituting; a little extra parsley is the nearest thing.
- Doneness and heatBrown gently — twelve minutes is for colour, not for cooking through. The thirty-minute simmer should be a bare tremble; breast pieces will be done well before the legs, so pull them early if they are firming up. Thigh meat should read 175F, breast 165F.
- YieldA 3 lb chicken in twelve pieces serves four, with rice, boiled potatoes or bread for the sauce.
Poulet sauté à l'estragon is one of the standard sautés of the French repertoire, and its structure here is textbook: brown the pieces in butter, build an aromatic garnish in the same fat, deglaze with white wine, mount with demi-glace, finish with the fresh herb. Tarragon - French tarragon, propagated by cuttings because it rarely sets viable seed - was strongly associated with French cookery, and turns up often in the professional cookbooks of the period. The reliance on two gills of demi-glace points to a professional kitchen rather than a domestic one: it assumes the brown sauce is already made and to hand, an assumption that runs through much hotel and restaurant cookery of the era.