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Chicken Breasts Sautès
(Petti di pollo alla sautè) Cut the breast of a fowl in very thin slices, give them the best possible shape and make a whole piece from the little pieces that will remain, cleaning well the breast-bone, crushing and mixing these. Season with salt and pepper and dip the slices in beaten eggs, leaving them for a few hours. Sprinkle with bread crumbs ground fine and sautè in butter. Serve with lemon.
If you want this dish more elaborate prepare a sauce in the following way: Put some good olive oil in a frying pan, just enough to cover the bottom, and cover the oil with a layer of dry mushrooms. Sprinkle over a small quantity of grated cheese and some bread crumbs. Repeat the same operation three or four times, according to the quantity, and finally season with olive oil, salt and pepper and small pieces of butter. Put the pan over the fire and when it has begun to boil pour a small cup of brown stock or broth and a little lemon juice. Remove the same from the fire and pour it on the chicken breast that have been browned as described above. 46
A plain cutlet-and-crumb method with an optional layered mushroom sauce that reads oddly on the page but works once you see it as a slow oil-and-mushroom braise. Two details need attention: the thickness of the slices and the state of the dried mushrooms.
- Slicing the breastTwo boneless breasts from a 4 lb chicken give four to six scallopine. Slice on a slight bias, no more than 1/4 inch, and flatten between plastic to an even thickness so they cook through in the time the crumbs take to brown. The trimmings the recipe tells you to crush and mix into "a whole piece" are best simply chopped and cooked separately rather than reassembled.
- The egg soak"Leaving them for a few hours" in beaten egg must happen in the refrigerator, covered, not on a counter. An hour is plenty for the egg to cling; overnight is fine. Crumb only just before frying or the coating turns pasty.
- Dried mushrooms need soakingThe sauce layers dry mushrooms into oil, which in a modern pan will scorch before they soften. Soak them 20 to 30 minutes in warm water first, squeeze them out, and reserve the strained soaking liquid to use in place of some of the stock. Roughly 1/2 to 3/4 oz dried porcini is the right order of quantity for four servings.
- Reading the sauceYou are building three or four thin strata of mushroom, grated cheese and crumbs in a shallow pan with just enough oil to cover the bottom, then wetting the whole with a "small cup" of stock, about 1/2 cup, plus lemon. Keep the heat at a bare simmer and do not stir much; the crumbs and cheese thicken it into a rough, spoonable relish rather than a smooth sauce.
- "Brown stock or broth"Use a low-sodium chicken or beef stock and salt at the end, since the cheese and the reduction both concentrate.
- Butter and heatButter alone browns crumbs fast and burns faster. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of oil, over medium heat gives you the color the recipe wants. Cook about 2 to 3 minutes a side for 1/4-inch slices; 165F at the center.
- CheeseGrated cheese here means Parmigiano or a hard grana, not a melting cheese. A dry-grated pecorino also works and pushes the sauce saltier, so hold back the added salt.
- Yield and servingFour modest servings. Serve the cutlets crisp with lemon wedges, and spoon the mushroom sauce alongside rather than over them if you want the crumb coating to stay crisp.
Petti di pollo in the sautè style belongs to a family of thin, breaded meat slices that runs through nineteenth-century Italian domestic cooking, related to the veal cotoletta and to Pellegrino Artusi's treatments of chicken breast. A recipe that stretches the two breasts of a single fowl into a platter of neat slices, then salvages the ragged trimmings into "a whole piece," reflects a kitchen where nothing from a bird went unused. The optional sauce is a frugal invention of the same sort: dried mushrooms, grated cheese and breadcrumbs layered in oil, moistened with a little broth, deliver depth without a second cut of meat. The dish is given twice over, once plain and once "more elaborate," so a cook could scale the effort to the occasion.