POULET EN PERSILLADE
Read about “warhorse recipes”—and the lessons they teach for our cooking—after the recipe for Poulet en Persillade just below.
Poulet en Persillade ready for the oven, its persillade—a finely minced mixture of parsley and garlic—dotting it.
RECIPE: Poulet en Persillade (Chicken baked with mustard, parsley and garlic, in a cream sauce)
From “New Menus from Simca’s Cuisine,” by Simca Beck with Michael James. Serves 6.
Ingredients
2 fine, fresh chickens, each 3 1/2 to 4 pounds, cut into serving pieces
2-3 tablespoons tarragon mustard or Dijon mustard flavored with 1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon or 1/2 teaspoon dried
6 cloves garlic, peeled
8-10 large sprigs of parsley
1 cup concentrated chicken broth (made from a bouillon cube or paste, if you wish)
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2/3 cup heavy cream
Salt and freshly ground pepper, as needed
1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon or parsley (optional)
Recommended equipment: An ovenproof dish (such as enameled cast iron), large enough to hold pieces of chicken in one layer
Directions
Pat the pieces of chicken dry and coat them generously with the mustard. Finely chop the garlic and parsley together in a food processor or with a knife (or “herb mill” such as a Mouli). Pour the chicken broth and vinegar into the bottom of the baking dish; sprinkle in half of the persillade (the chopped garlic and parsley). Arrange the chicken in the dish and sprinkle with the remaining persillade. Cover with a piece of buttered foil. The dish can now wait for an hour or so at room temperature before baking.
Bring the liquid in the dish to a simmer on top of the stove, then bake the chicken in a 375-degree oven for 35-40 minutes. Turn the pieces once or twice as they cook; you may remove the pieces of the white meat from the oven 5-7 minutes sooner than the dark, as they tend to cook faster. The chicken is done when it is fairly firm to the finger, still moist, and only faintly pink at the bone; it should not overcook or it will be dry.
Transfer to a serving platter and keep warm in the turned-off oven (about 200 degrees). Pour the heavy cream into the baking dish, stir it well to deglaze the baking juices, and reduce over medium-high heat. After 8-10 minutes you should have a sauce of nice consistency; taste it for seasoning. Pour a bit of the sauce over the chicken and sprinkle with the chopped fresh tarragon or parsley. Pass the remaining sauce in a sauceboat.
To prepare the dish an hour or so in advance: Cook the chicken for 30 minutes, then remove it to an ovenproof platter and cover it with foil (remove the breast meat 5 minutes before the dark meat). Finish the sauce as directed and pour it into a saucepan. Twenty minutes before serving, place the chicken in a 350-degree oven to finish its cooking and warm it through. Reheat the sauce and serve with the chicken as directed above.
STORY: By now, I must have prepared (the famed French cookbook author, cooking instructor and friend to Julia Child) Simone Beck’s recipe for “poulet en persillade” three dozen times—probably more. It is a favorite, obviously. Nevertheless, I haven’t consulted the printed recipe in years.
I simply make poulet en persillade by rote. Perhaps the dish that I cook now differs from the original, as in that old parlor game in which a story passes along a chain of people and ends up telling the opposite from where it began.
Poulet en persillade isn’t even Simca Beck’s anymore. My friends merely ask for “that chicken with cream sauce.” (The dish is a braise of chicken, tarragon mustard, minced parsley and garlic, finished with thick cream.)
I didn’t used to be so routine about recipes. When I began to cook, more than 40 years ago, I was more precise. I feared to botch a recipe if I did not capture all of its detail down to every last grain of salt.
Like the time I asked a friend whom I routinely watched cook, “So, how much salt did you just add?” When she answered, “Oh, a touch,” I was exasperated. She must’ve known if it was a 1/4 teaspoon or a 1/2 or whatever quantity. Why didn’t she just say that?
I used to collect recipes as did my mother, from whom I first learned to cook (she had thousands, scissored from newspapers mostly, stuffed in drawers, layered like a pommes Anna).
But I don’t collect recipes anymore. I have my handful of warhorses such as the poulet en persillade, and my mother’s mushroom soup, and a pork loin (or uncured belly) simmered unendurably slowly in milk, until the liquid comes to be curds and, then, nubs of caramel. That dish, I know, is Marcella Hazan’s, but of course I haven’t looked at the recipe in ages.
Looking back like this makes me realize that a quietude has come to my own cooking and eating. Recipes no longer lay down any gauntlets.
They’ve become old friends, old house slippers.
I approach any new recipe with that in mind: Does it have in itself what it takes to become an old friend? And how would I determine that?
All of my favorite recipes tell me a story, about how tawny a crust is, say, or how oozy the fruit or layered the sauce. A recipe may smell faintly, or opulently. It may skillfully poise one flavor against another, or it may be a happy jumble of flavors or scents or textures or colors - or all of those.
I read a recipe as if I were reading a short story or—better—a short theater piece. First, we have the dramatis personae, the list of characters (the ingredients); then the action, step-by-step perhaps, or interleaved; and, finally, the ta-da. “Remove from the oven and serve.”
Because I have cooked for so long, I can imagine all this without having to have the ingredients, or the utensils, or the oven and its heat before me.
If my imagination enjoys the story or the show, I’ll perform it myself. More likely, I will tinker with it and make it my own. Even more likely, I will take two or three recipes that tell the same story, by and large, and use what I like or choose from one at the same place in another, shuffling them like cards, as it were, until the final story plays out using all the characters or action that I consider would make for the best ta-da.
I can do that because recipes allow for that, once you become comfortable as a cook.
Recipes as we know them—a list of ingredients, their quantity, and directions for their preparation—are a modern phenomenon, from only the 1800s.
Before then, recipes were short stories in fact, mere wee narratives aimed at those who already knew cooking and were certainly and already familiar with the dish described. They were just reminders.
This is the recipe “To stew mutton” from a 1664 Dutch cookbook: “Take Mutton; cut into large pieces, well cooked and skimmed, add to it long pieces of Parsnips, and furthermore all sort of greens coarsely chopped, and some Pepper and Salt; thus cooking and stewing these together until the Mutton is done.”
There’s a ta-da there, but a modern cook wouldn’t know whom to cast from the “all sorts of greens” ensemble—or how much of any—to act out the drama or tell the story.
The modern recipe evolved because cooking did. Cooking went from the purview of those who already knew what they were doing to instructing those who didn’t—daughters, the newly educated (that is, those who could now read), the newly propertied (that is, those who now could afford the ingredients).
Instead of a peerage thing, cooking became top-down, and with that so did recipes.
The very word “recipe” is fascinating in this historical respect.
Its base is the Latin verb, “recipere,” which itself has many meanings (among them: to recover, to receive, to undertake, to accept) and has given us many words (here, especially receipt and recipe). The original “receipt” was the formula or prescription of medicaments that a patient (not only “one who suffers” but also “one who accepts”) was to take into their body in order to become well.
When you see the letters “Rx” on a pharmacy marquee, you’re seeing the ancient shorthand for the word “receipt.”
In the Latin declension of verb recipere, “recipe” is the second person singular imperative; it commands you to “take,” hence the first word of countless recipes—the first word of old-style narrative form recipes or the first word in the directions of many modern form recipes—“Take …”.
So, all you cooks, take. Take up the cookbook; take a look at the stories it tells; take one of them for yourself and make it your own, perhaps in time a favorite, an old friend in your home.