Chicken Cutlet Bagna Cauda
you heard me
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Here’s a thing about me:
I am not afraid of doing recipes that have been done. Alfredo sauce. Tuna Melt. Eggplant Parm. If I love to cook it and eat it, it’s worth doing, I always say.
This week, I took it one step further: two “known” entities, newly together. Gastronomical matchmaking: I am obsessed with my friend Chicken Cutlet and think she’d get have amazing banter with my other buddy, Bagna Cauda. So I set them up on a date.
Reader: sparks flew.
I have a preferred, tested way of making chicken cutlets, and didn’t feel burdened by the need to change it up. Thighs; three step breading (using potato starch); shallow fry. I’m not wasting time optimizing a recipe I’ve already optimized.
Bagna cauda, on the other hand, is a recipe I admire on an intellectual level and also as something to eat, but I think I’ve only made it once. If you’re new to the bagna cauda scene, it is a “hot bath” of anchovies, garlic, olive oil and/or butter. This is a warm sauce, enjoyed as a dip for vegetables in France and Italy and likely anywhere where tables set under leaf-tangled pergolas can be found. Sometimes there are herbs, and sometimes there are nuts. When I had it a couple of weeks ago at Jess Shadbolt and
’s King Restaurant, it had chianti wine.With the help of food stylist and friend Alivia Bloch, I kicked off the quest to nail the ratios. This is a typical first step in my recipe development when there’s a known entity involved. I like to look at many versions and get a feel for how other cooks have codified their recipes. Before long, we had found two solid references from my cookbook collection. The recipes themselves were simple. The headnotes for those recipes were a master class in positioning.
Get a load of these romantic instructions from Lulu’s Provençal Table, by Richard Olney. We are told to “prepare a table away from that at which lunch will be served,” which immediately situates us outdoors, with enough acreage to have not one but two tables dressed for company. Cue the dappled sunlight and rosé! Also, it’s lunch. Here is Lulu:
Bagna cauda is best eaten out-of-doors and it has to be eaten standing up, with the apéritif. Each time one dips a vegetable into the sauce, a piece of bread must be held beneath the dripping vegetable between the pot and the mouth. You need lots of anchovy and lots of olive oil, not so much garlic, and very little vinegar. These proportions are all right for 8 well-bred people [!!!], but there are always some gens mal éléves who dip their bread in the sauce—for them, you need to make a lot more.
What I love the most about this passage, aside from the directives (has to be, must be, need to), is the implication that some truly untoward characters might be coming for bagna cauda, and rather than scolding them for being piggish with their bread dipping, the cook simply must make extra sauce. This, at its core, is true hospitality—designed to ensure that your mannered guests don’t miss out on sauce.
Next up, The Essential New York Times Cookbook, edited by Amanda Hesser. Here, we get a very different picture of the bagna caudians:
Get out your saucepan—or that little cazuela you bought in Europe that’s been collecting dust. Assemble the olive oil, butter, garlic, and anchovies you already have in your kitchen. Then, trim that overload of vegetables from your C.S.A., and make the dish.
Tag yourself!
I think I made bagna cauda once, maybe twice, and have memories of twisting sturdy paperclips into a three-legged stand that could support a ramekin filled with sauce, kept warm by a burning votive candle underneath. Fun, but nerve-wracking. For the chicken cutlet mashup, I wanted to deliver lots of warm buttery garlic-anchovy sauce, without the feats of engineering. Once the cutlets are fried to a crisp, the same pan they’re cooked in is readied for both the veggies and the sauce. First, a quick pan-roast of some asparagus, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon. Then, the sauce comes together quickly in the skillet with olive oil, garlic-anchovy paste, butter, fines herbes, lemon juice and a generous addition of white distilled vinegar (sorry, Lulu, “very little vinegar” wasn’t enough for me).
Crisp-tender asparagus suspended in bagna cauda, topped with a cutlet that is dressed with even more sauce, this tastes like chicken escargot but better. Two great things that taste great together—maybe I didn’t “invent” either one, but this is the mashup we all deserve.
The video will take you through all the steps, and includes a sidebar in defense of asparagus pee, plus a perfectly-timed phone call from my dad, Frank. Watch and enjoy, and then go take an anchovy bath.