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Chicken a La Creci
(Flanders.) Chop 1/2 pound of bacon, fry it with 12 tiny white onions, 12 button mushrooms, 2 carrots, and 6 chestnuts; cut into dice in 2 ounces butter. Add a large chicken, which has been cut up and cooked for 1/2 hour in some broth. Add also salt and pepper, a blade of mace, and a glass of white wine or sherry. Cook, covered, for 40 minutes and serve hot.
A Flemish braise dressed in French terminology, written with the loose punctuation of its period. Read the ingredient list carefully before starting: the bacon and vegetables are what get diced, and the butter is the fat they fry in.
- Parsing the first sentence"Cut into dice in 2 ounces butter" belongs with the bacon, onions, mushrooms, carrots and chestnuts, not with the chicken. Dice the bacon and carrots, leave the small onions and button mushrooms whole, and fry everything gently in 4 tablespoons of butter until coloured.
- A glass of winePeriod cookbooks usually reckon a wineglass at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, though usage varied. Sherry gives a rounder, sweeter braise than dry white; either suits the bacon and chestnuts.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in whole blades or ground. A blade is roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace. The recipe adds it with the wine and seasoning; fish the whole blade out before serving.
- ChestnutsFresh chestnuts must be scored, roasted or boiled, then peeled of both shell and inner skin while hot. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are the practical substitute and go in whole rather than diced.
- The chickenA "large chicken" here probably means a bird of about 4 to 5 lb, jointed into eight. Poach the pieces 30 minutes in broth, keeping the liquid at a bare shiver rather than a boil, then reserve the broth to moisten the braise.
- Total cooking timeHalf an hour poached plus 40 minutes covered is a long haul for modern fast-grown chicken. Add the breast pieces for the last 20 minutes only, or accept that they will be soft and shreddy in the way a stewed hen used to be.
- Heat and vesselThe recipe specifies only a covered pot; cook over low heat, with enough of the reserved broth to come a third of the way up the meat. The sauce is meant to be short; uncover for the last few minutes if it is loose.
- SeasoningHalf a pound of bacon carries a lot of salt. Season at the end, after the broth has reduced.
- YieldServes four to six, with bread or boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
In French kitchen shorthand à la Crécy means carrots, a usage generally traced to the carrot-growing districts around Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Picardy and Crécy-la-Chapelle east of Paris, both of which claim the name. The label was applied freely to soups, garnishes and braises through the nineteenth century, and here it has drifted onto a dish the compiler assigns to Flanders, where bacon, small onions, button mushrooms and chestnuts are stewed with wine or beer. Books of this kind gather national dishes from travel and correspondence; the recipes arrive compressed, without quantities of liquid or oven settings, on the assumption that a cook already knew how to manage a covered pot.