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Chicken En Matelote
(Normandy.) Joint a nice chicken and fry it in butter. Add 6 small onions and a carrot, sliced, 6 small mushrooms and 6 parsnips, cut into dice, parsley, thyme, sweet marjoram, salt, and enough stock to cover. Simmer in a closed pot for 1/2 hour. Strain the sauce and add to it 1 anchovy, cut up, 1 teaspoonful of capers, and 1 glass of claret. Return it to the fowl, cook 20 minutes longer, and serve with slices of toast.
A one-pot braise that borrows the name and method of a fisherman's wine stew and applies them to chicken. The instructions are terse in the way period cookbooks are; most of the decisions are left to the cook.
- The hinge: strain, then finishThe sauce is strained away from the bird and vegetables before the anchovy, capers and claret go in, then poured back.
- "1 glass of claret"Claret is the British term for red Bordeaux. Period books reckon a wineglass anywhere from about 2 to 4 fl oz, so the quantity is genuinely vague; erring low is safer since the sauce reduces afterwards.
- Joint a nice chickenA roasting bird of roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb, cut into serving pieces. Brown it in butter in batches so the pieces colour rather than steam.
- The anchovyIn this period an anchovy usually meant a whole salt-cured fish, likely saltier than a modern oil-packed fillet. Use one or two fillets, rinsed, and hold back on salt until after the sauce comes together.
- Six parsnips is a lotRead alongside the "small" onions and mushrooms, six diced parsnips may well mean small roots; two or three medium parsnips, diced, will match the intent, and more than that and the sweetness takes over the pot.
- HerbsParsley, thyme and sweet marjoram with no quantities given — a few sprigs of each, tied together, so they can be lifted out at the straining step. Sweet marjoram is milder than oregano and not interchangeable with it.
- TimingHalf an hour covered, then twenty minutes more in the finished sauce, gives fifty minutes of gentle cooking. Keep it at a bare simmer; a rolling boil will leave the breast pieces stringy well before the thighs are done. Pull breast pieces early if they finish first.
- Yield and servingNo yield is stated; one chicken with the vegetables will stretch to about four. The toast is functional -- set it under or around the chicken to take up the sauce.
Matelote comes from matelot, French for sailor, and the classic dish is a freshwater fish stew braised in wine with onions and mushrooms, associated with the river towns of the Loire and the Marne. Applying the name to poultry is a recognised extension — matelote came to describe the treatment (wine, small onions, mushrooms, a strained and enriched sauce) as much as the fish itself. The Normandy attribution here fits the butter-first browning, though Norman cooking is often associated with cider or calvados rather than claret. With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of travel cookbooks in which an American or British writer collected dishes abroad and rendered them for a home kitchen.