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Chicken Boned and Stuffed
(Pollo dissossato ripieno) To remove the bones from a chicken the following instructions will be found useful. Wash and singe the fowl: take off the head and legs, and remove the tendons. When a fowl is to be boned it is not drawn. The work of boning is not difficult, but it requires practice. The skin must not be broken. Use a small pointed knife cut the skin down the full length of the back; then, beginning at the neck, carefully scrape the meat away from the bone, keeping the knife close to the bone. When the joints of the wings and legs are met, break them back and proceed to free the meat from the carcass. When one side is free, turn the fowl and do the same on the other side. The skin is drawn tightly over the breast-bone, and care must be used to detach it without piercing the skin. When the meat is free from the carcass, remove the bones from the legs and wings, turning the meat down or inside out, as the bones are exposed, and using care not to break the skin at the joints. The end bones of the wing cannot be removed, and the whole end joint may be cut off or left as it is.
Now that the fowl is boned make the following stuffing, regulating the quantity on the size of the chicken. Chop half a pound or more, of lean veal, and grind it afterwards, so that it may make a paste. Add a large piece of bread crumb soaked in broth, a tablespoon of grated cheese, three yolks of egg, salt, pepper and, if desired, just a taste of nutmeg. Finally mix also one or two slices of ham and tongue, cut in small pieces.
Stuff the boned chicken with this filling, sew up the opening, wrap it tightly in a cloth and put to cook in water on a low fire. When taken from the water, remove the wrapping and brown it, first with butter, then in a sauce made in the following way: Break all the bones that have been extracted from the chicken, the head and neck included, and put them on the fire with dried meat cut in little pieces, butter, onion, celery and carrot, seasoned with salt and pepper. Make the sauce with the water in which the chicken has been boiled, which has naturally become a good chicken broth.
Before sending to the table, remove the thread with which the chicken has been sewed. 41
A galantine in all but name, and the technique rather than the seasoning is the difficulty. Read the boning instructions through twice before picking up a knife; everything after that is straightforward cooking.
- Start with a drawn birdThe original assumes an undrawn fowl, since a bird bought whole from a poulterer still had its viscera. Any supermarket chicken is already cleaned, so ignore that line and simply bone the carcass; a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken is the right size.
- The hinge: keep the skin wholeThe skin is the casing for the entire dish, so a puncture means stuffing leaks into the poaching water and the roll collapses. Work with a short, sharp knife held against the bone, scraping rather than slicing, and be particularly slow over the breastbone ridge and the wing and leg joints where the skin is thinnest.
- Veal forcemeatHalf a pound of lean veal, ground twice or pulsed to a paste in a food processor, is the base. Ground veal from the counter works; ground pork or a mix of pork and veal is the usual modern substitute if veal is hard to find. Keep the meat cold while grinding so the paste does not break.
- "Dried meat" in the sauceThe phrase points to a cured meat used for flavour rather than as a portion: prosciutto ends, pancetta, or a piece of salt pork, cut small. A couple of ounces browned with the bones, onion, celery and carrot is enough.
- Wrapping and poachingRoll the stuffed bird tightly in a double layer of cheesecloth and tie it at both ends and in two or three places along its length, like a bolster. Poach in water or light broth barely trembling, never boiling, or the forcemeat swells and splits the skin.
- Time and temperatureReckon about 1 to 1 1/4 hours at a bare simmer for a 4 lb bird. Because the stuffing contains raw ground meat and egg, take it to 165F at the centre of the roll on an instant-read thermometer rather than going by time alone.
- Browning and the sauceButter in a wide pan over medium-high heat, turning the unwrapped roll until it colours, then finish it in the sauce. The sauce itself is the broken bones and vegetables browned in butter, moistened with the poaching liquid, simmered down and strained; reduce it until it coats a spoon, since there is no flour thickening here.
- Slicing and yieldLet the roll rest 15 to 20 minutes before you cut the thread, or the slices fall apart. Served warm in thick slices it feeds six; chilled overnight under a light weight and sliced thin, it goes further as an antipasto.
Boned stuffed poultry of this kind belongs to the long European tradition of the galantina, a bird reconstructed around a forcemeat and served either hot in its own sauce or cold in slices. The Italian domestic version, with veal paste bound by egg yolk and enriched with grated cheese, ham and tongue, is often said to have been a dish for Christmas and for weddings, precisely because the labour showed: the cook's skill was visible in the fact that no bones appeared on the plate. This book keeps the frugality intact as well as the display, since nothing is wasted. The extracted bones, head and neck all go back into the pan, and the poaching water becomes the broth that makes the sauce, so the bird supplies its own stock. The instruction to soak bread crumb in broth to lighten the forcemeat is a very old one, generally traced to the medieval and Renaissance kitchen, where soaked bread served as the standard binder before the modern reliance on flour and cream.