Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2 (116 page)

TO SERVE COLD

Poularde en Chaud-froid—Poularde en Gelée

[Chicken in
Chaud-froid
—Chicken in Aspic]

The tender fragrant quality of chicken poached in white wine and the excellence of its cooking broth made it ideal for
chaud-froid
or simply chicken in aspic. For
chaud-froid
, you might use half the broth for an initial creamy coating on the chicken pieces following either the cream and
egg-yolk sauce
, or the recipe in Volume I, page 551, with cream and gelatin. You could then decorate the chicken
with tarragon leaves, and glaze with clear aspic made from the rest of the broth. Full directions for
chaud-froids
are in this vo lume and in Volume I as indicated; see
aspics
in this volume, and page 549 in Volume I.

STUFFED CHICKEN—BONED CHICKEN

When you want to serve stuffed chicken, either roasted or poached, it is easier to carve it if you bone the breast of the raw chicken, meaning that you slit the skin and peel it back from the breast, remove the meat, and cut out the breastbone and upper half of the ribs. This gives you a boat-shaped trough; its bottom is formed by the backbone, and its sides by the lower ribs, the wings, and the legs. Pile the stuffing into the trough, top with breast meat cut into strips, fold the skin back into place, and the chicken is reconstituted again for cooking. To serve, cut right down the length of the breast to reveal white meat and stuffing, while the legs and wings come off in the usual way. Because white meat picks up flavor when in direct contact with the stuffing, most of the dark-meat-only people will shift over to “a little of both, please.” You will also find this semiboning a successful way to treat the enormous breasts of modern turkeys, and a turkey is boned exactly like chicken (see
illustration
).

VOLAILLE DEMI-DÉSOSSÉE

[Half-boned Chicken—also for Turkey, Other Poultry, and Game Birds]

With heavy shears and starting at the tail end, cut through the upper half of the breastbone-rib structure midway on each side, where the backward-slanting top ribs join the forward-slanting bottom ribs. Continue the cut through the V-shaped bone at the neck end, and the breastbone is freed.

With the breastbone removed, you now have a boat-shaped open cavity to fill with stuffing. The 2 boneless pieces of meat, one removed from each side of the breast, are called
suprêmes
, and each is composed of 2 layers. The larger layer is the
filet;
the smaller layer is the
filet mignon.
On the underside of each
filet mignon
is a clearly visible white tendon. Grasp the end of it in a towel held in one hand; slit flesh on either side with a small knife and, scraping it against your knife as you gently pull, draw it out; repeat for the second tendon.

(*)
AHEAD-OF-TIME NOTE
: If you are not ready to stuff the chicken at this point, place the
suprêmes
in the cavity, draw the chicken skin over them, wrap the chicken, and refrigerate it. Chop up the breastbone and add it to your chicken stock.