Home › Chicken and Game › Chicken with Sherry
Chicken with Sherry
(Pollo al marsala) Cut the chicken in big pieces and put it in the saucepan with one medium sized onion chopped fine and a piece of butter. Season with salt and pepper and, when it is well browned, add some broth and complete the cooking. Remove the excessive fat from the sauce by sifting through a sieve or otherwise, and put the chicken back on the fire with a glass of Sherry or Marsala wine, removing it from the fire as soon as the sauce begins to boil. 43
A short braise that depends on two things: a genuinely deep brown on the chicken, and restraint with the wine at the end. The original assumes a cook who knows what "a piece of butter" looks like, so here are the numbers.
- The hinge: the wine goes in lastThe chicken is already cooked when the Marsala arrives, and the recipe pulls the pan the moment the sauce boils. That keeps the wine tasting of grapes rather than of reduced syrup. If the raw-alcohol edge bothers you, give it 60 to 90 seconds at a simmer, no more.
- A glass of wineRead a "glass" here as something on the order of 150 to 200 ml, so 2/3 to 3/4 cup. Use dry Marsala (secco or semisecco) or a dry amontillado-style sherry; cream sherry and sweet Marsala all'uovo will turn the sauce cloying.
- A piece of butterAbout 2 to 3 tablespoons for a whole cut-up bird. Butter alone browns hard at high heat, so either add a spoonful of olive oil or brown over medium heat and accept a slower colour.
- Chicken size and cutting"Big pieces" means a bird cut into eight or ten: halved breasts, thighs, drumsticks, wings. A 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken serves four. Bone-in pieces are the point; boneless breast overcooks long before the sauce is worth eating.
- Broth quantity and timingAdd about a cup, enough to come a third of the way up the pieces, cover partly, and simmer 25 to 35 minutes until thighs reach 175F. Pull the breast pieces out once they reach 165F and return them for the wine.
- Removing the fatStraining hot sauce through a sieve does not degrease it. Tip the liquid into a narrow cup or jug, let it stand two or three minutes, and spoon or pour the fat off the top; a fat-separator jug does it in seconds.
- ServingThe sauce stays thin by design. Serve it spooned over the chicken with polenta, plain rice or bread, not with pasta, which will drink it and leave nothing behind.
Pollo al marsala belongs to a family of quick Italian pan dishes built on a fortified wine added at the very end, and Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (published in New York in 1919) offers the American reader sherry as a substitute in the English title while keeping Marsala in the Italian one. Marsala is a fortified wine from the western tip of Sicily, generally traced to English merchants who began shipping it in the late eighteenth century and fortified it with spirit so it would survive the voyage, much as they had done with port and sherry. The recipe gives no weights, no times and no yield, assuming a cook who already knows how a browned chicken should look.