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Chicken with Egg Sauce
(Pollo in salsa d'uova) Break into pieces a young chicken and put it in the saucepan with a piece of butter. Season with salt and pepper. When it is half browned sprinkle with a pinch of flour to give it color, then complete the cooking with broth. Remove it from the same and put it on a plate. Beat the yolk of one egg with the piece of half a lemon and pour it on the sauce of the chicken, allowing it to simmer for some minutes. Then pour on the chicken and serve hot. 45
A small braise finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison, written in the telegraphic style of its period. The whole dish turns on how you handle the yolk at the end.
- The hinge: never boil the sauce after the egg goes in"Allowing it to simmer for some minutes" is misleading by modern standards — yolk sets into curds above roughly 180F. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the beaten yolk with a ladle of the hot pan juices, return it, and stir over the lowest heat until it thickens to a coating consistency, a minute or two at most.
- "The piece of half a lemon"An awkward translation; it almost certainly means the juice of half a lemon, beaten into the yolk.
- "A young chicken"A small young bird of 2 to 2.5 lb, cut into eight pieces. A supermarket bird of 3.5 to 4 lb works but will need noticeably longer braising, 30 to 35 minutes; the original specifies no time.
- Saucepan, not casseroleThe "saucepan" here is a wide, shallow pan — the chicken needs to sit in one layer to brown. A 12-inch skillet with a lid or a shallow braiser is the right vessel.
- "A pinch of flour"Underspecified. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons scattered over the browned pieces and cooked for a minute before the broth goes in; more than that turns the pan juices pasty and works against the egg liaison.
- Broth quantityNone is given. Add about 1 cup of chicken broth — enough to come a third of the way up the pieces. You want a concentrated few tablespoons of liquid left at the end, since the yolk has to thicken it, not rescue a thin pool.
- DonenessCook to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh. Rest the chicken on a warm plate, loosely covered, while you finish the sauce.
- YieldServes two to three as written, four if the chicken is a full-size bird and you serve it with bread or plain rice to catch the sauce.
This is the Italian branch of a very old Mediterranean family of egg-and-lemon sauces — the same idea as Greek avgolemono — in which beaten yolk and acid are used to thicken and enrich a cooking liquid without cream or a long-cooked roux. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American home cooks at a time when Italian cooking in the United States was still largely the property of immigrant households, and its recipes are compressed to the point of shorthand, assuming a reader who already knows what a braise looks like. The technique itself predates the tomato in Italian cooking: yolk-and-acid finishes are often said to go back to the Renaissance kitchen, and the method survives in dishes like fricassea, where the sauce is deliberately left pale rather than browned. The number 45 at the end is most likely the recipe's index number in the original book rather than a timing.