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Minced Chicken, with Macaroni
Prepare the chicken or fowl in small, thin scallops, and add to them some Bechamel sauce; when about to dish them up, first place some macaroni (dressed with grated Parmesan cheese and a spoonful of Bechamel sauce) round the bottom of the dish in the form of a border, and put the mince in the center, piled up like a cone; pour a little white sauce round the entrée, and serve.
MINCE, OR SCALLOP, OF FOWL AU GRATIN.
Cut the meat off the breast and other white parts of a roast of fowl with about a tablespoonful of Bechamel sauce; cut the meat into shreds or scallops; add to it a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan cheese, a little nutmeg, pepper and salt, a small piece of glaze, and a half gill of cream; toss the whole together over the fire until well mixed, and then place the scallops in a dish, piled up in a dome; cover this entirely with a coating of fried bread crumbs mixed with grated Parmesan cheese, in the proportion of twothirds of the former with one-third of the latter; sprinkle a little clarified butter over the surface, place round the entrée a border of fancy-cut croutons of bread, or of potatoes (previously fried), and then put into the oven for about ten minutes, being careful that they do not burn. Next pour Bechamel sauce round the entrée, and serve.
Two related ways to reuse cooked poultry, written for a cook who already has béchamel and glaze on hand. The hinge is that nothing here is actually cooked through in the dish — the chicken must already be roasted or poached, and the fire and oven only heat and brown it.
- "Mince" and "scallop" hereNeither is ground meat in this recipe: it says plainly "cut the meat into shreds or scallops." Scallops are thin, broad slices from the breast; the mince is those slices tossed in sauce. Cut them thin so the pile holds together.
- Half a gill of creamOn the American measure a gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz); on the British imperial measure a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is nearer 2 1/2 fl oz. Either way it is a small quantity. Heavy cream is the right choice; it will hold up when tossed over heat with the cheese.
- GlazeA "small piece of glaze" is meat glaze — brown stock reduced until it sets firm and jellied, cut off in a lump. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace or a reduced-stock concentrate stands in; a stock cube does not, being mostly salt.
- Béchamel of the periodBechamel of the period -- Nineteenth-century bechamel was often a white roux moistened with veal or chicken stock and finished with cream rather than the milk-only version now standard. Making it with half stock and half milk gives the flavour the dish is built around.
- Oven for the gratinThe recipe names no temperature, only "about ten minutes" to set the crust and heat through; a hot oven does that. The crumbs are already fried, so they colour fast -- check early.
- Fried bread crumbsThe crumbs go into the oven already browned in butter, then mixed two parts crumbs to one part grated Parmesan. Raw crumbs will not brown in ten minutes and the topping stays pale and soft.
- The macaroni borderCook the macaroni just short of soft, drain well, and dress it with Parmesan and a spoonful of sauce while hot. Period macaroni was often long tubes broken into lengths; short elbows or ziti build a firmer ring.
- Fowl versus chickenA "fowl" was generally an older bird with firmer meat, more often boiled or stewed than roasted -- though this recipe assumes a roast one. Poached chicken thighs or the meat from a leftover roast bird both work.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The white meat of one bird with sauce and pasta will stretch to perhaps three or four as a main course, more as one course among several. Both versions want to be assembled at the last minute and carried straight to table.
Both of these are drawing-room French cooking as filtered through the English service kitchen trée, béchamel, glaze, croûtons and au gratin belongs to the whole Anglo-French service repertoire, the tradition in which chefs such as Charles Elmé Francatelli and Alexis Soyer cooked in England in the mid-nineteenth century and whose phrasing was recycled by compilers for decades afterward. What the recipes really are, though, is thrift: instructions for the day after a roast fowl, when the breast is intact but the bird can no longer be brought to table whole. Piling the meat into a cone or dome inside a border of macaroni or fried potato croutons is a purely visual solution to a leftovers problem, and the fact that a household cookbook assumed a cook could produce béchamel and a lump of meat glaze without being told how says a good deal about the kind of kitchen these books were written for.