[Sca-cooks] period fried chicken?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

"Mark.S Harris" wrote:
>
> Jana gave a recipe:
>
> PICKLED PULLETS
> The French Cook
>
> After they are will dressed. cleave them in two, if they are small.
> break
> their bone and set them a pickling with vinegar, salt, peper, chibol and
> lemon peels: let them steep therein, till you have occasion to use them,
> and
> then set them a draining, flowre them, and frie them in fresh seame or
> lard;
> after they are fryed, stove them a very little with their pickle them
> serve
> them with a short sauce.
>
> Redaction by THL Gillian of Lynnhaven and Magnus Gra'hetta
>
> <snip>
>
> Cut chicken into strips. (each breast in 1/2 then in 1/3 strips)
> Marinade
> in first 5 ingredients 3 hours maximum.
> Drain off the pickling juice and reserve.  Roll the chicken pieces in
> flour
> and fry in Indian sesame oil.
> <snip>
>
> We've discussed chicken recipes many times before, including some that
> were fried. This is the first that I can remember that calls for the
> chicken to be floured and then fried. Sounds pretty close to modern
> fried chicken to me.

Except that this is more like braised chicken, because the cooking is
finished in the marinade. The recipe than talks of serving them with a
"short", or rich, sauce. It seems to me thickening the marinade with
some egg yolks would be the way to go for a fricassee sort of effect. I
have a couple of questions, though...
>
> But I don't recognise the book and there is not time frame for the
> recipe given. So this might not actually be a period recipe.

Well, depending on your version of period, this is pretty darned late.
Le Cuisinier Francoise, written by La Varenne in approximately 1650, was
translated into English some short time later, maybe 1655 or so. That
appears to be the source for this.
>
> Jana, or anyone else, can you give us more details on the original
> recipe? It does sound interesting. I wonder how the taste changes if
> the meat is kept in the pickling juice for a week or two instead of
> only a few hours. If this is meant to preserve the meat, why the
> "3 hours maximum" in the redacted recipe? If this does keep the
> meat, I wonder if this would work for keeping meat without refrigeration
> for things like Pennsic.

That would depend on the strength of the vinegar, I suspect, but then I
also suspect that the palatability might be compromised by really strong
vinegar. Part of the issue of marinating time may have a lot to do with
the portion/service control, which involves the chicken pieces being
smaller than 1/3 of the size the recipe seems to stipulate [halves].
Presumably larger pieces would require a longer time for the acid to
penetrate into the flesh, and to denature ("cook") the protein. It
should be noted that the safe cooking temp for potentially
salmonella-ridden American battery chickens is 157 degrees F. and up;
after steeping it in acid, that is one cooked bird, but I have no
records on whether vinegar has any effect at all on salmonella or its
produced toxins.

I'm in the midst of some kind of brain bubble as to the acidity of
natural vinegars; I know commercial vinegars are normally brought either
up or down to 5% acidity, but I forget whether real vinegar would be
more or less potent than this. It's been a long day. If the vinegar is
less strong than we;re used to, and the pieces of bird are larger than
the adapted recipe calls for, it's conceivable that the recipe would
work without rendering the chicken already cooked before... um...
cooking it. And then, of course, it's possible that if the vinegar were
"weak", it wouldn't keep very well at Pennsic.

I agree that some experimentation might be in order.

So. Why Indian sesame oil? Is this just a matter of personal aesthetics
on the part of the adaptors of the original recipe?

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98