Home › Chicken and Game › Chicken with Tomatoes
Chicken with Tomatoes
(Pollo alla contadina) 17 Take a young chicken and make some little holes in the skin in which you will put some sprigs of rosemary and a clove of garlic cut into five or six pieces. Put it on the fire with chopped lard and season with salt and pepper inside and outside. When it is well browned on all parts add tomatoes cut in pieces, taking care to remove previously all the seeds. Moisten with broth or water. Brown some potatoes in oil, fat or butter, previously cutting them into sections. When browned dip in the sauce of the chicken and serve the whole together.
A one-pot country braise where the aromatics go under the skin rather than in the pot. The original assumes a heavy pan over live fire and a cook who knows when a bird is done.
- The hinge: potatoes finish in the sauce, not in itBrown the potato wedges separately until the outsides are set and colored, then add them to the pan only at the end to take up sauce. Cooked in the braise from the start they shed starch and turn to mush.
- "Chopped lard"Almost certainly cured pork back fat minced fine (the Italian lardo), closer to unsmoked pancetta than to the rendered white lard in a tub. Use about 2 oz finely chopped pancetta or salt pork, and hold back on the salt accordingly.
- A young chickenA 2½–3 lb bird, whole or cut into serving pieces. Pieces are easier: they brown evenly and finish in roughly 35–40 minutes covered, where a whole bird wants 50–60.
- The slitsCut shallow pockets under the skin with the tip of a knife rather than piercing the flesh through. Push in the rosemary sprigs and garlic slivers so they perfume the fat as it renders.
- TomatoesIn season, 1½ lb ripe fresh tomatoes, halved and seeded, skins left on as the original implies. Out of season, a 28 oz tin of whole peeled tomatoes, drained of their seedy juice and torn.
- DonenessThe book gives no times. Go by 165F at the thickest part of the thigh; the sauce should be reduced and glossy, not soupy.
- Liquid"Moisten" implies only a small quantity, perhaps a cup or less — enough to keep the pan from scorching while the tomatoes break down. This is a braise, not a stew.
- YieldServes four with bread. No green vegetable is called for; the potatoes are the accompaniment.
Pollo alla contadina means simply chicken in the country-woman's manner, and the name is a whole class of Italian dishes rather than one fixed formula: whatever the farmyard and the kitchen garden supplied, cooked in one pan with pork fat. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American households at a moment when Italian food was moving from immigrant kitchens into the general repertoire, and it leans heavily on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, the 1891 collection widely credited with doing more than any other book to standardize regional Italian cooking in print. The instruction to seed the tomatoes recurs in recipes of the period. Studding meat with rosemary and garlic pushed under the skin is a technique shared with Tuscan roast pork and lamb.