This entremet is based on two recipes from Le Viandier du Taillevent.
It was part of my 2007 Atlantian Pentathlon in Persona entry at the Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival. For sources, please see the Pentathlon Bibliography.
An entremets for a feast day or for a princely banquet on the three meat-days
of the week, namely, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. For stuffings
and meatballs: you need, for the balls, raw pork – the cut of pork
does not matter – with which the hens are to be stuffed. After
the poultry is killed, you should make a break in the skin by the head
and blow through a hollow feather until the skin is inflated, then scaled
the poultry and cut them under the belly and skin them; put the carcasses
to one side.
To make the stuffing for the poultry you should have
white meat, bacon chopped up with the meat, eggs, good fine spice powder,
pine nut paste and currants, and stuff the skin of the poultry with it,
without overfilling and bursting it, then sew it up again; this should
be boiled in a pan on the fire and should be allowed barely to cook, then
mount them on slender spits. And when the meatballs are well made
they should be set to cook with the poultry, and take them out when they
have hardened; for the balls, get spits that are half as thick or less
as those for the poultry.
After that, you should have an egg batter such that
it will stay blended in the pan. When the poultry and the meatballs
are almost cooked, remove them and put them in the batter; take the batter
in a clean spoon, constantly stirring, and put it over the poultry and
the meatballs until they are glazed with it; and do it twice or three times
so that they are well coated with it. Then you need to take gold
leaf or silver leaf and wrap them in it; you need to dampen them with a
little egg white for the leaf to stick better.
Take your hens, cut their neck, scald and pluck them,
and be careful that the skin remains undamaged and
whole, and do not plump the birds; then take some sort
of strap and push it between the skin and the flesh,
and blow, the n cut the skin between the shoulders,
not making too large a hole, and leave the legs. wings
and neck still attached to the skin.
To make the stuffing, take mutton, veal, pork and dark
meat of chicken, and chop up all of this raw, and grind
it in a mortar, together with a great quantity of raw
eggs, cooked chestnuts, a good rich cheese, good spice
powder, a little saffron, and salt to taste. Then stuff
your chickens and sew up the hole again. With any leftover
stuffing make hard balls, using a great deal of saffron,
the size of packets of woad, and cook them in beef
broth and boiling water gently, so they do not fall
apart. Then mount your chickens and the balls on very
slender iron spits.
While Le Recueil de Riom contains two recipes for entremets or
subtleties – one for a stuffed, glazed and gilded mutton shoulder
and one for a goat’s head – neither were as appealing as the
ones found in Taillevent for restuffed “chicken”. I first
ran across these dishes while preparing a 14th century Burgundian feast – the
appeal of the dish to an SCA cook was that one could have the presentation
of a “whole” chicken, that could then be sliced by the diners – no
carving required.”
Both of these recipes describe very similar dishes,
so I decided to use portions of each to create a new dish.
The addition of all the additional meats can make this dish somewhat cost-prohibitive when serving a SCA feast; I have successfully used no meat other than the original chicken carcass, simply adding breadcrumbs, eggs, spices and either raisins or currants to make this dish. To make up for the lack of bulk from removing the bones, a hardboiled egg can be placed in the center of the chicken and the stuffing formed around it. This adds another layer to the “joke” of a boneless chicken, and answers the question of which came first. The chickens can be gilded completely with the “decorator gold”: $5 worth of the “Lustre Dust” powder is more than enough for an entire feast hall worth of chickens.