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Chicken, Udaipur
Singe, cut heads and feet off two small tender chickens of one and a half pounds each. Split open through back without detaching, draw, wipe, envelop in a towel and neatly flatten them with a cleaver. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, and repeatedly turn chickens in seasoning. Arrange on a double broiler, broil six minutes on each side, remove, spread on both sides a Udaipur sauce and roll in bread crumbs; replace on broiler and broil for four minutes on each side, dress on a hot dish over six freshly prepared toasts and serve with Indian chutney separately.
A spatchcocked broiled chicken, crumbed halfway through cooking, in the grand-hotel style of the early 1900s. Two details need translating before you start: what "double broiler" meant, and the fact that the Udaipur sauce lives elsewhere in the book.
- The sauce is a cross-referenceThe recipe assumes you have already made the book's Udaipur sauce, which is not reproduced here, so its composition cannot be recovered from this page; without it the dish is simply crumbed broiled chicken. Find the sauce entry elsewhere in the book, or use a spiced butter as a stand-in so the crumbs have something to grip.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler and not the overhead broiler in your oven. It is a hinged wire grill basket that clamps the flattened bird between two grids so it can be turned as one piece over live coals. A grill with a weight on top, or a heavy cast-iron press, gives the same result.
- Birds of a pound and a halfChickens that small are now sold as Cornish game hens or poussins; a supermarket broiler runs 3 to 4 lb. Two hens serve two to four; one 3 lb bird split and flattened will serve four but needs noticeably longer than the times given.
- Times are for tiny birdsSix minutes a side, then four more a side, is about twenty minutes total, which suits a 1.5 lb bird pressed flat over coals. Go by temperature rather than the clock: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh. A modern broiler chicken will want roughly twice the time.
- Crumbs go on late for a reasonThe bird is broiled bare first, then sauced and crumbed for the final minutes. Do not crumb at the start; the coating will be black before the thighs are done. Keep the heat a little further from the fire once the crumbs are on.
- Splitting through the back"Split open through back without detaching" is spatchcocking: cut down either side of the backbone or straight through it, open the bird out, and flatten it. The cleaver blow is meant to crack the breastbone so the bird lies truly flat; pressing hard with the heel of your hand does the same job.
- Singeing, heads and feetInstructions for a bird bought whole and undressed. Nothing to do if you are buying oven-ready poultry, though it is worth checking for pinfeathers along the wings.
- The toast and the chutneySix pieces of toast are set under the birds to catch the juices, which is the point of them; cut them to fit the dish rather than serving them alongside. Any sharp fruit chutney, mango included, answers for the "Indian chutney" served separately.
Dishes named for Indian cities were a fixture of the international restaurant repertoire that grew up around the great hotels and steamship lines at the turn of the twentieth century, when a curry-scented butter or sauce was enough to earn a plate a place name. Udaipur, the old Mewar capital in Rajasthan, was well known to English-speaking readers of the period as a princely city of lake palaces, and its appearance on a menu signalled the exotic rather than any particular local cooking; there is no evidence this is a Rajasthani preparation. What is genuinely of its moment is the technique: a small bird split, flattened, clamped in a hinged broiler over coals, then finished with sauce and crumbs so it arrives crisp. Books of this era treat their sauces as a numbered kitchen library, and a recipe like this one is written as a short instruction to a cook already holding the sauce book open.