[Sca-cooks] Re: Period Fried Chicken

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Elise Fleming wrote:
>
> I wrote:
> >Greetings.  The "Pickled Pullets" sounded tasty so I copied off the
> >recipe.  Just read it this morning and now I have a question.  It
> >says to set the chicken in a pickling of vinegar, salt, pepper,
> >chibol and lemon peels and to let them steep.  Then the chicken is
> >fried, and they are served with some of the pickle in which they
> (as
> >raw chickens) sat for a number of hours.  My question is... Is this
> >safe?  Does that pickling really kill all the nasty raw chicken
> >germs that we are warned about?  How come modern marinades, to
> which
> >you add vinegar and water, tell you to throw out the marinade and
> >not re-use it?
>
> Maggie MacD. responded:
> >This marinade is added to the pan after the chicken has been cooked
> and
> >removed, and it deglazes the pan (as well as making a very tasty
> >gravy).  Any of the nasty germs/microbes that COULD be in the
> marinade are
> >then very well cooked, just like the chicken.  You don't just toss
> the
> >marinade in the pan then toss it on the plate, it gets cooked for
> several
> >minutes. (Or at least, that's the way we did it at the feast).
>
> Except that's what the original recipe says to do.  I didn't post
> back into this thread after I read that the modern interpretation
> said to boil up the marinade.  But there is no evidence in the
> original recipe that one was to do that.  With subsequent posts in
> later digests (I'm sort of behind!) it seems that it still might not
> be a safe thing to do.  I suppose one could make up more marinade,
> or reserve some of it prior to putting the chicken in.

Yes, the original recipe (which has perversely vanished from where i
thought I would find it) says something about stoving it for a short
time (or some such) in the marinade, and then says to serve it with a
short sauce. So, you are presumably finishing it fairly quickly in the
pickle, which you might presumably use as the basis for your sauce, but
that appears to be optional, so long as the sauce is "short", which a
marinade isn't. "Short" generally means fatty, rich, or tender, as in
short paste, so maybe some butter beaten in for a drawn/beaten butter or
beurre blanc kind of effect might be recognizable to the original cook,
or maybe an egg yolk liaison might be nice. But I suspect the shortness
of the sauce is to counteract the sourness of the marinade, and it
doesn't really specify whether the pickle is intended as a sauce
component at all. Maybe claret, orange juice and butter? The options are
pretty broad.

As for the safety issues of using the marinade as a sauce, well, what
tends to be pathogenic and/or toxic about undercooked chicken is killed
at a temperature that is pretty low by simmering standards. Assuming the
marinade gets hotter than even poaching temperatures of around 160
degrees Fahrenheit, it should be pretty safe.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
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