Home › Eggs and Omelets › Chicken Alla Cacciatora
Chicken Alla Cacciatora
(Pollo alla cacciatora) Chop one large onion and keep it for more than half an hour in cold water, then dry it and brown it aside. Cut up a chicken, sprinkle the pieces with flour, salt and pepper and sautè in the fat which remains in the frying pan. When the chicken is brown add one pint fresh or canned tomatoes and half a dozen sweet green peppers and put back the onion. When the gravy is thick enough add hot water to prevent the burning of the vegetables. Cover the pan tightly and simmer until the chicken is very tender. This is an excellent way to cook tough chickens. Fowls which have been boiled may be cooked in this way, but of course young and tender chickens will have the finer flavor. 36
A braise written for a tough bird, which is the whole point of it: the long covered simmer is what makes it work, and rushing it on a young supermarket chicken gives you a thinner dish. Note that the book prints this among the egg and omelet pages, an indexing slip rather than a clue about the method.
- The soaked onionHalf an hour in cold water draws out some of the raw onion's sulphurous bite, and the instruction suggests a cook working with a sharper onion than a mild modern yellow one. The step can be skipped, though it may leave the gravy a little sweeter. Dry it thoroughly or it will steam rather than brown.
- "Brown it aside"Brown the onion first in fat, then lift it out and hold it while the chicken browns in the same pan; it goes back in with the tomatoes. Left in, it would scorch during the longer browning of the meat.
- The fat is unspecifiedNo quantity or type is given. Three to four tablespoons of olive oil works; lard or rendered chicken fat would also suit the dish.
- Peppers"Sweet green peppers" most likely means ordinary green bell peppers, though small thin-walled frying peppers would also fit; six is a generous amount, so two or three bells will do. Seed and cut them in strips; they collapse into the sauce over the long simmer.
- TomatoesOne pint is two cups, roughly a 15–16 oz can with its juice. Canned whole tomatoes crushed by hand are closer to the original than pureed passata.
- Timing"Simmer until very tender" means 45 minutes to an hour for an ordinary 3-4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces, and considerably longer, up to two hours, for an old stewing hen. Breast pieces can be pulled out early and returned at the end if they dry.
- Adding hot waterAdd it hot, a little at a time, only when the pan threatens to catch. Cold water into a hot braise stalls the cooking and dulls the sauce.
- YieldOne chicken serves four, with bread or polenta. The gravy is generous and is meant to be mopped up.
Alla cacciatora means "hunter-style," a name attached across Italy to braises of poultry or rabbit built from onion, tomato and whatever aromatics were at hand; the association with the hunt is traditional rather than documented, and regional versions vary widely, some using wine and no tomato at all, others mushrooms or olives. What is striking in this version is its frankness about economy: it is offered explicitly as a way to redeem tough birds and even fowl already boiled for stock. That reflects the poultry of the period, when a hen was kept for eggs and only stewed once she stopped laying, and the tender young roasting chicken was a treat rather than the default. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American households learning Italian cooking, and this recipe carries its Anglo-American accommodations plainly, canned tomatoes as an accepted equivalent to fresh and no wine anywhere in sight.