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Coquilles De Volaille
Boil your chicken the same as for salad. Pull the meat from the fowl, cutting in pieces the size of the end of your finger. Take the top of the water that the chicken was boiled in-say half a cup. In this have an onion minced fine and boiled in it; take flour; wet it with cold water and stir in boiling water. It must be like paste; stir all the time to prevent [194] lumping or burning. Take from the fire when well cooked and add a cup of butter, a box of mushrooms sliced thin and a few truffles, one cup of cream; season highly with cayenne pepper and salt; when cold add a large wine glass of sherry wine; put your chicken in the sauce and let it stand for several hours, Place in the shells; sprinkle bread crumbs on top and brown in the oven just before serving. Mrs. Bickham, New Orleans.
A New Orleans creamed-chicken gratin baked in scallop shells, written in the shorthand a cook of 1900 could fill in from experience. Two things need deciding before you start: how much flour, and how much butter.
- The sauce is a velouté, so measure the flourNo quantity is given, and the amount of boiling water stirred into the flour paste is left open as well. For roughly half a cup of broth and a cup of cream, 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour will do, cooked until it thickens and loses its raw taste. "Like paste" is accurate: the mixture should be stiff before the cream goes in, since it will loosen considerably.
- A cup of butter is a period quantityWhisked into a sauce for one chicken this is roughly half a pound of fat, and it will separate on reheating. Four tablespoons stirred in off the heat gives the same gloss and holds together in the oven.
- "The top of the water"The rich, fatty layer that rises on chicken broth as it stands. Skim half a cup from the surface of the cooking liquid; it carries both fat and flavour, which is the point of specifying the top rather than the pot.
- A box of mushroomsMost likely a tin or box of preserved mushrooms, the usual commercial form at the time; no weight is given, so any figure is a guess. Half a pound of fresh mushrooms, sliced thin and sautéed dry until their water has cooked off, is a reasonable substitution — untreated fresh mushrooms will thin the sauce.
- A large wine glass of sherryA period wineglassful was reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so a "large" one is roughly a quarter cup, perhaps a little more. It goes in cold, as directed, though the shells are afterwards browned in the oven, which will drive off some of the alcohol.
- The shellsReal or ceramic coquille shells hold roughly half a cup each; small ramekins do the same work. The yield depends on the size of the fowl, but expect enough to fill six to eight.
- Browning temperature"Brown in the oven" here means heat through and colour the crumbs, not bake. A hot oven, 425F, for 10 to 15 minutes, or run them under a broiler once hot. Toss the crumbs with a little melted butter first or they scorch dry before they colour.
- The resting step is not optionalLetting the chicken sit in the cold sauce for several hours lets the meat absorb the sherry and cayenne; skip it and the filling tastes of sauce with plain chicken in it. Refrigerate while it stands, and bring the shells to room temperature before they go in the oven so the centres heat through.
Coquilles de volaille is simply "poultry in shells" — French kitchen language for a dish of minced cooked meat bound in a rich white sauce, returned to scallop shells, crumbed and glazed. The form was a nineteenth-century mainstay, prized because it used up yesterday's boiled fowl while looking like something ordered in a restaurant. That this version comes from a New Orleans contributor is unsurprising: Creole household cooking kept French terminology and French sauce technique, and the truffles and sherry mark it as a company dish from a household with a good grocer.