Chicken Piccata

The Italian-American escalope in a pan sauce of lemon, white wine, butter, and a great many capers

Origin: New York, United States

From the journey of Caper.

Piccata is Italian for something pounded flat, and in Italy the dish it names is usually made with veal and finished with lemon and butter, sometimes with capers and often without. What happened in New York was that the capers stopped being optional and multiplied. Southern Italians arriving from the 1880s brought the salted capers of Sicily and Campania with them, and the restaurant cooking that developed over the following half-century turned piccata into something recognisably its own: chicken rather than veal, because chicken was cheap and abundant in America in a way veal never was; a thicker flour coating; more butter; and a caper load that an Italian cook would consider excessive and a New York cook considers the whole point. The sauce should be visibly full of them. That is not a criticism. The dish works because the capers, the lemon, and the wine together carry enough acid and salt to stand up to a quantity of butter that would otherwise be sickly, and thinning them out would unbalance it. It is one of the best demonstrations of what a caper actually does in a sauce, and by sheer volume of restaurant covers it is probably the single largest use of capers in the world. The technique is French in ancestry and takes about fifteen minutes. Pound, flour, fry hot and fast, remove the meat, deglaze the pan, mount the sauce with cold butter off the heat, and pour it over. Everything worth having in the dish is in the browned residue on the base of the pan, which is why the meat comes out before the sauce is built and why the pan is never washed in between. It is Italian-American rather than Italian, and there is no need to be defensive about that. It is a real dish with a real place and a real history, and it belongs to New York.

Ingredients

Chicken

4 whole skinless chicken breasts, halved horizontally into 8 thin cutlets
60 g plain flour, for dredging
0.5 tsp fine sea salt
0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
20 g unsalted butter, for frying

Sauce

120 ml dry white wine
180 ml chicken stock
5 tbsp capers, rinsed and drained
3 tbsp lemon juice, from one large lemon
60 g cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

To Finish

3 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 whole lemon, thinly sliced, optional

Method

Lay each cutlet between two sheets of greaseproof paper and beat with a rolling pin or the flat of a heavy pan until an even 5 mm thick.
Season the flour with the salt and pepper. Pat the cutlets dry, dredge them in the flour, and shake off all the excess.
Heat the oil and the 20 g of butter in a large frying pan over a medium-high heat until foaming. Fry the cutlets in two batches, two to three minutes a side, until deep golden. Do not crowd the pan.
Transfer the cooked cutlets to a warm plate and cover loosely. Pour off any excess fat but leave the browned residue in the pan.
Pour in the wine and bring to a fast boil, scraping the base with a wooden spoon to lift everything stuck to it. Reduce by half, about two minutes.
Add the stock and the capers and boil for three to four minutes until reduced by about a third and slightly syrupy.
Take the pan off the heat, add the lemon juice, then whisk in the cold butter a cube at a time until the sauce is glossy and lightly thickened.
Return the chicken and any resting juices to the pan, turn to coat, and warm through for a minute. Taste for salt, which it will probably not need.
Scatter with parsley, add the lemon slices if using, and serve at once with plain pasta, mashed potato, or bread.

Notes

Veal is the Italian original and is excellent here; pork loin cutlets and thick slices of firm white fish also take the same treatment well. A vegetarian version with thick slices of roast cauliflower or with fried aubergine works better than it sounds. Do not salt the sauce until the end, and taste before you do. Capers, stock, and the seasoned flour together usually make it unnecessary. The commonest failure is a thin, watery sauce, which comes from not reducing enough before the butter goes in. It should visibly coat the back of a spoon before you start mounting it. Some New York versions add a splash of cream, which is not traditional and makes the sauce more forgiving if you are nervous about splitting it. Others use lemon slices fried in the pan for a bittersweet edge from the caramelised peel.

The Gastrographer

Name: Chicken Piccata
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 30 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: United States
Ingredients: 4 whole skinless chicken breasts, halved horizontally into 8 thin cutlets; 60 g plain flour, for dredging; 0.5 tsp fine sea salt; 0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper; 3 tbsp olive oil; 20 g unsalted butter, for frying; 120 ml dry white wine; 180 ml chicken stock; 5 tbsp capers, rinsed and drained; 3 tbsp lemon juice, from one large lemon; 60 g cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes; 3 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped; 1 whole lemon, thinly sliced, optional

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control