Chicken Florentine

[cimorene]

I posted a few weeks ago about Florentine omelette, a recipe we really liked, after I saw it mentioned in a book (neither of us had heard of it previously).

Florentine or à la Florentine is a term from classic French cuisine that refers to dishes that typically include a base of cooked spinach, a protein component and Mornay sauce. Chicken Florentine is the most popular version. Because Mornay sauce is a derivation of béchamel sauce which includes roux and requires time and skill to prepare correctly, many contemporary recipes use simpler cream-based sauces.

A Florentine omelette doesn't have Mornay sauce; it's just an omelette with spinach and cheese filling (parmesan and gruyere traditional). However, eggs Florentine is a common café/diner dish from the UK and Australia, a breakfast sandwich with a poached egg, spinach, and sauce on an English muffin. (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce in that case.) Chicken Florentine might be the oldest version: that idea is out there, but it might be apocryphal too. The history of the term and the style is colorful but probably not accurate:

Culinary lore attributes the term to 1533, when Catherine de Medici of Florence married Henry II of France. She supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularized Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage.[4] Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.[5] Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for sole Florentine in his 1903 classic Le guide culinaire, translated into English as A Guide to Modern Cookery.

(Quotes from Wikipedia, Florentine (culinary term))

Because Chicken Florentine was trendy in the US in the mid 20th century, the popular English-language versions of the recipe have suffered from simplification. Recipes from the midcentury reportedly used mushroom soup. Modern ones overwhelmingly use cream instead of Mornay sauce; it was necessary to put "Mornay" in the search terms before I found any recipes with it (because 1. it's not hard to make a roux, like what are you talking about? & 2. we wanted to try the more authentic recipe). We looked at three and used this one because the Mornay sauce called for wine, mustard powder, and nutmeg. We didn't use gruyere, though, just parmesan, and served it over white rice and it was sooooooo good. So delicious.

Comments

[stranger]

eggs Florentine ... (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce ...

I suppose those people are confusing it with eggs Benedict, but there is no need to partake of their delusions.

[cimorene]

Oh, that could be it!

[princessofgeeks]

OM NOM NOM

[tozka]

I've definitely heard of eggs Florentine but I've never tried it-- or Mornay sauce, either! I don't know if I'll ever get the energy to make it myself, but it does sound yummy and if I spot it on a menu I'll for sure try it.

[cimorene]

The name "Mornay" was new to us too when I looked up eggs Florentine, but it's a familiar sauce to almost all Americans because it's the cheese sauce in macaroni and cheese!

[isilya]

It sounds really delicious! I am a big fan of béchamel with wholegrain mustard as the flavour as a sauce for grilled chicken or fish (it's really good on grilled salmon fillets with a side of mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli and carrots--kind of nursery food but so comforting and delicious). In Australia we call béchamel "white sauce" and mornay only make an appearance in the form of "tuna mornay" which is white sauce with cheese and canned tuna.

I have fond memories of being a young drunk teen sitting around chatting with friends and one saying "I wish I could make béchamel" and so I jumped up and showed him how, at like 3am in the shitty bachelor's flat kitchen. I have to made béchamel with lactose free milk and corn starch because of dietary requirements these days but I think it's actually easier than using wheat flour for the roux.

Is a supermarket rotisserie chicken a thing you can easily obtain in Finland? Because it occurs to me that this Florentine sauce, but with shredded leftover rotisserie chicken, and some shop-bought puff pastry on top, would make delicious pot pies.

[cimorene]

I only found out about the word from Wikipedia! Now you mention it, I've heard of tuna mornay maybe? But, yeah, the word is never used in America (or like, chefs probably do, but I've never heard it). I think white sauce is the term in common use, but my mom (cookbook collector and food hobbyist) always called it bechamel. I probably could have found this type of recipe with one of those as the search term too. Nobody ever mentions it in connection with macaroni and cheese, but almost anyone who cooks there will have made that. Wax and I have tried like 7 different recipes for it and I don't think any of them named white sauce even, let alone mornay. Wax thinks they don't want to scare people off by the mental association with fancy or french cooking, lol.

She also is committed to trying your rotisserie idea now!