Home › The World's Kitchen › Fricasseed Chicken, Ancienne
Fricasseed Chicken, Ancienne
Singe, cut head and feet off a tender two-and-a-half-pound chicken, draw and neatly wipe, then cut in twelve even pieces, bones and all, place in a saucepan with enough cold water to cover the chicken and season with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a sprig thyme, bay leaf, clove, and add to chicken, then let boil for fifteen minutes.
Cut three ounces of pork left over from day before yesterday in half-inch-square pieces, add to chicken with twelve peeled, small white onions and one good-sized, peeled, raw potato cut in half-inch pieces. Lightly mix, cover pan, let gently boil for forty-five minutes. Place chicken broth in a bowl and skim fat off surface. Mix in a saucepan three quarters ounce butter and flour, stir while heating for a half minute, pour the broth into this pan and sharply whisk until it comes to a boil. Dilute an egg yolk with one tablespoon cream and juice of half a lemon, add it to sauce, sharply mixing while adding it, and heat for one minute longer. Remove the herbs, strain sauce into the pan, gently mix the whole well together, pour into a large, deep dish and serve.
A classic white fricassee, thickened at the end with a yolk-and-cream liaison. Everything hangs on that last step.
- The hinge: do not boil the finished sauceOnce the egg yolk, cream and lemon go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — the recipe's "heat for one minute longer" means bring it back to steaming, no further. A boil curdles the yolk and leaves grainy threads through the sauce.
- "Pork left over from day before yesterday"The pork is evidently a cooked leftover from an earlier meal; salt pork or boiled bacon is a plausible reading, though the recipe does not actually say it is cured. Use about 3 oz of salt pork or slab bacon, diced and blanched a minute in boiling water to pull the harshest salt out, or unsmoked pancetta. Smoked bacon will dominate what is meant to be a pale, delicate dish.
- The birdA 2½ lb chicken is a small young bird by current standards; a 3½–4 lb chicken is the usual supermarket size and will feed four rather than two or three. One way to reach twelve even pieces is to halve the breast crosswise and split the back, so everything comes out roughly the same size.
- Simmer, do not boil"Let gently boil" for forty-five minutes is period language for a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. A true rolling boil for an hour will shred the breast meat and cloud the broth, which needs to stay clear enough to make a pale sauce.
- HerbsChervil is worth seeking out for its faint anise note, but if it is unavailable use a little extra parsley plus a few tarragon leaves. The "clove" is one whole clove — more than that and it takes over.
- The roux"Three quarters ounce butter and flour" most likely means ¾ oz of each — roughly 1½ tablespoons of butter and 2½ tablespoons of flour — though it can also be read as ¾ oz of the two together. Either way it is a light binding for the skimmed broth, the quantity of which will depend on how much water it took to cover the bird. Cook it only the half minute specified: this is a white sauce and any colour in the roux shows.
- SkimmingPouring the broth into a bowl before making the sauce is not fussiness. The fat renders out of the pork and skin, and left in it will break the finished liaison into an oily surface.
- YieldFour servings from a modern bird. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or bread are the traditional accompaniment; the sauce is the point.
The fricassee sits between a sauté and a stew: the meat is cooked in liquid but never browned, and the cooking liquid becomes the sauce. "À l'ancienne" — in the old style — signals the oldest and plainest treatment, with small onions, a bouquet of herbs and a finish of egg yolk, cream and lemon, a liaison French cooks had long used to thicken and pale a sauce at the last moment. Fricasseed chicken had by this period also crossed into English and American kitchens, where it often meant something browner and floured; the label here points to the French version. The instruction to use pork "left over from day before yesterday" is a small window into the household this was written for, one where cooked pork could simply be assumed to be standing in the larder.