A guide to modern cookery

carcass thus remains. Cut it into two, and trim each piece on both sides. Before setting them to cook, moderately season the pieces of fowl with salt and pepper. Whatever the demands of a particular recipe may be, the preparatory principle of _sautéd_ chickens is always as follows:— Take a sautépan just large enough to hold the pieces of fowl, and heat therein two oz. of clarified butter; or, according to circumstances, half butter and half good oil. When the selected fat is quite hot, insert the pieces of fowl; let them colour quickly, and turn them over from time to time, that they may do so evenly. Now cover the utensil, and put it in a sufficiently hot oven to ensure the complete cooking of the fowl. Some tender pieces, such as the wings and the breast, should be withdrawn after a few minutes have elapsed, and kept warm; but the legs, the meat of which is firmer and thicker, should cook seven or eight minutes more at least. When all the pieces are cooked, withdraw them; drain away their butter, and swill the sautépan with the prescribed liquor, which is either some kind of wine, mushroom cooking-liquor, or chicken stock, &c. This swilling forms, as I have already pointed out, an essential part of the procedure, inasmuch as its object is to dissolve those portions of solidified gravy which adhere to the bottom of the sautépan. Reduce the swilling-liquor to half, and add thereto the sauce given in the recipe. Put the pieces of carcass, the claws, the pinions and the legs into this sauce, and simmer for a few minutes. The other pieces, _i.e._, the wings and breast, are then added, but when the sauce is sufficiently reduced, it must stop boiling. When the pieces are completely cooked, it is obviously unnecessary for the sauce to boil, since the former would only be hardened thereby. A few minutes before serving, put the pieces into a deep entrée dish (fitted with a cover) in the following order:—The pieces of carcass, the claws and the pinions on the bottom