This dish was inspired by the Larousse Gastronomique. The big book of (often not very practical) classical cuisine is full of very brief, often vague recipes that can be quite useful as a source of ideas.

This past week I had on hand the breasts, thighs, and drumsticks of five chickens which I had purchased whole to make chicken stock. At 78 cents a pound, the total cost was about $15, so I had my chicken stock made from the backs and wings, and 30 parts left over to cook with. Not a bad deal.

So, I needed to decide how to cook all those parts, what sauces to make, etc. The Gastronomique has a two-page chart of sauces, which matches each sauce to the foods that it goes with. Look up the type of food in the first column, and in the second column you will find a list of the sauces used for that food. For example, the sauces listed for “poultry, sautéed” are: bourguigonne, chasseur, curry, duxelles, hongroise, périgourdine, portugaise, salmis, and zingara. Most likely you’ve never heard of a few of those, but of course there’s an entry within the Gastronomique of each and every sauce in the chart.

For me, sauce hongroise was an easy choice – I love paprika. Here’s the recipe for the sauce:

Sauce Hongroise

Peel and chop some onions and fry them in butter, without browning them. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with paprika. For 6 tablespoons cooked onion add 250 ml (8 fl oz, 1 cup) white wine and a small bouquet garni. Reduce the liquid by two-thirds. Pour in 500 ml (17 fl oz, 2 cups) velouté sauce (with or without butter enrichment). Boil rapidly for 5 minutes, strain through a strainer lined with muslin (cheesecloth) and finish with 50 g (2 oz, 1/4 cup) butter.

The next recipe after Hungarian sauce is for Hungarian mushrooms:

Mushrooms à la Hongroise

Clean and wash some mushrooms and cut off the stalks. If the mushrooms are very small, leave them whole; if they are larger, cut them in quarters and dip them in lemon juice. Gently sauté them in butter without letting them colour. Pour off the butter from the sauté pan and replace it with cream, lemon juice, paprika, salt and pepper. Reduce by half, sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve very hot.

These recipes both sounded delicious, so I decided to combine them in my chicken dish. So I browned my chicken breasts in a nice big sauté pan, then threw them in the oven to finish cooking through. I added a bit of butter to the pan and quickly sautéed some shallot, and then the quartered mushrooms. Seasoned the mushrooms and as their liquid reduced, deglazed the pan with a glass of white wine. Reduced the wine almost au sec, then added the heavy cream, a good squirt of lemon juice, and a generous amount of paprika (one spice that I’m heavy-handed with). As soon as the cream had reduced by about half, the sauce was done, I returned the chicken and tossed it with the sauce and some chopped parsley, and then I took some pictures and sat down to eat.

Hope you like the recipes, and if you have the Gastronomique on your shelf, do spend some time with it; its full of entirely useful gems of recipes, not just outdated, complicated, heavy classical preparations.

Brown the chicken breasts

Saute mushrooms

Deglaze with a little white wine, then reduce until almost dry

Add cream and paprika, and reduce the cream by about half

When the sauce is finished, return the chicken to the pan and toss around