The rules which a rôtisseur follows are simple. He starts with a good hot oven, sometimes reducing the heat when the meat or bird begins to brown. How much he lowers the temperature depends on the size of the piece being cooked. The smaller it is, the hotter the oven should be. A squab, for example. should be roasted at a temperature of 400 degrees or more, a turkey at 350 degrees or less. When the roast can be conveniently turned in the pan, as can poultry and legs of lamb, it is turned frequently. Of course, every roast is regularly and thoroughly basted. Alors, all this turning and basting may seem to be added work, but it is well worth the trouble if you are cooking for gourmets. Such care is probably more important for poultry than for anything else. Turning a bird from side to side encourages the juices to drip through the breasts instead of draining away from them. Basting combats any tendency the flesh may have to become dry during cooking. The results of your care will be very obvious when the roast is carved at the table.
Roasting poultry pases more problems than roasting meat does. Should you stuff it, and if so, with what? With bread crumbs or rice or sweet potatoes? Should the stuffing be dry, moist or bland? Tasty with chestnuts and mushrooms or rich and savory with foie gras and truffles? Do you know how to truss your bird? Unless the bird is trussed. the heat of the oven invariably forces the legs and wings away from the body, and the meat, particularly the breast, cooks dry. Should you put water in the roasting pan? Would that prevent a scorched, bitter-tasting gravy?
I like to roast chickens the way my mother did. I can still see her in her white blouse and black skirt, with a big full apron tied around her waist, bent over the open oven, basting for a holiday dinner two or three chickens browning side by side in the black roasting pan that had once belonged to my grandmother. She put just a little water in the pan, probably to compensate for the uncertain beat of her old stove. The pan sat right on the oven floor. Each time fresh wood was added to the fire, the temperature would shoot up, and without the water the pan juices might have been scorched. I like to add a little water to the roasting pan even in our modern ovens because it permits me to use a higher temperature without danger of burning the drippings, and to me a quickly cooked bird seems tastier.
Many of our guests at the Ritz knew about Maman's way of roasting chicken. and when they ordered a special dinner, they would ask the maître d' to have the chickens cooked that way. One famous guest I remember particularly well. Lord Beaverbrook, on one of his first visits to the old Ritz, asked for a chicken roasted with butter and served with plain pan gravy. [ said to him. “Oh, yes, we can do that; it's the French way my mother taught me.”
The next day Lord Benverbrook telephoned: “Always cook my chicken your mother's way, Louis; that's the best chicken I've ever had in America.”
The French are also very fond of chicken roasted in a partly covered casserole. The skin is not quite so crisp as it is when the chicken is routed in an open pan, but the bird is cooked too quickly to seem braised. Many cooks put vegetables in the casserole, too.
As Bordeaux, my old friend of Paris days, once said, “It takes an accident to make us appreciate the things we take for granted.” One day when he was chef at Baron Rothschild's in London, he had a capon roasting on the spit, just ready to be served. He told the kitchen maid to take it off when, as he said in his mixed French and English, “Zut, she burn her finger and drop the chicken onto les cendres de la cheminée.” The bird could not be rescued from the ashes of the fireplace, and there was no time to cook another. Fortunately, there were some chickens roasting en casserole for the servants' dinner. So Bordeaux served one of those to the Baron, and, to his relief, the Huron enjoyed it so much that be sent down to ask why the chickens hadn't always tasted that good.
In the hotel kitchen we cook many birds, usually from ten to thirty, side by side in a very large pan with a few inches or so between them. We cover them generously with fresh drippings. any fat except lamb, and baste them regularly. If you cook two or three birds at a time in your oven, remember to keep the temperature somewhat higher than you would for a single bird. Otherwise, too much steam forms and the chickens are apt to taste more stewed than roasted as a consequence.
To truss a bird, a chef uses a kitchen needle six or eight inches long, threaded with strong white string. He pierces the second joint or thigh, pushes the needle through the body and the other second joint; then he comes back and pierces the leg and pushes the needle through the body and the oilier leg; he goes back again through the wing, the body, and the other wing. The ends are tied across the back. Another string is run through the folded-back wing tips and tied. The string is never crossed or tied over the breast because it would leave a noticeable mark.
Stuffing is a matter of personal taste. Large birds such as turkeys, geese, capons. and large chickens are usually stuffed; the smaller ones are just as often roasted without stuffing. I have only two warnings. If you bother with sniffing. then go to the trouble and expense to make it good. And spoon the stuffing in lightly, never pack it in!
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