Chicken chasseur

Chicken chasseur (lit. 'hunter's chicken', but unrelated to the British dish of that name) is a French dish, known in France as poulet chasseur, poulet à la chasseur or poulet sauté chasseur. It consists of fried chicken served hot, with sauce chasseur, which is based on mushrooms, onions or shallots, tomatoes and wine, and may also contain stock and various herbs.

Etymology

Chasseur is the French for 'hunter', and sauce chasseur shares a multilingual connection with other cuisines. In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson writes that the phrase, meaning 'huntsmen-style', occurs in many languages: "Italians say alla cacciatora, Poles say bigos and the French chasseur." The term, according to Davidson, usually indicates the presence of forest mushrooms. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates the term chasseur to the 12th century; the dictionary refers to its culinary use, but does not give any indication of when it was first used in that context. The earliest citation of the culinary use of the word in English given by the Oxford English Dictionary dates from the 1880s.

History

In 1865 Bailey's Magazine recorded a dish of poulet à la chasseur served in a Parisian restaurant and costing the equivalent of half a guinea a head. In Le Figaro in 1870 Eugène Morand recorded a lunch eaten by a group of army officers at which—after two types of sausage, York and Bayonne ham, fried eggs, fillet steak, and macaroni with Parmesan—they concluded the savoury part of the meal with poulet à la chasseur ("Ah! quel plaisir d'être soldat!" (lit. 'Ah! What a pleasure to be a soldier'), commented Morand). The dish is mentioned in the American and British press during the later years of the 19th century.

Ingredients

Chicken chasseur is prepared using sautéed chicken, served with a chasseur sauce. All the following writers specify chopped or sliced mushrooms, and shallots or other types of onion, but vary as to the other ingredients of the sauce. Most recipes call for the addition of herbs: the most frequently specified are parsley and tarragon; others are basil, bay leaf, chervil, and thyme.

A dish with the English name "hunter's chicken" exists, but is unrelated to chicken chasseur. It consists of skinless and boneless chicken breasts wrapped in bacon, baked, and covered with barbecue sauce and melted cheese.

References

Sources

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Brazier, Eugénie; Roger Moreau; Paul Bocuse; Bernard Pacaud (2015) [2004]. La Mère Brazier: The Mother of Modern French Cooking. London: Modern Books. ISBN 978-1-906761-84-4.
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Davidson, Alan (1999). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-211579-9.
Diat, Louis (1946). French Cooking for Americans. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. OCLC 1036371103.
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