Cut a cooked chicken into pieces; add some slices of cold veal. Heat 1 cup of stock; add ¼ teaspoonful of mustard, ½ teaspoonful of paprica, a pinch of white pepper and salt to taste. Add the chicken and 1 glass of sherry wine. Let all cook ten minutes. Add 3 tablespoonfuls of currant jelly. Serve hot with toasted croutons.
A leftovers dish dressed up with sherry and currant jelly, of the type that filled late-Victorian and Edwardian "made dishes" chapters. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the meat is cooked.
- The hinge: don't boil the sauceThe chicken and veal are already cooked, so the ten minutes is only to warm the meat and marry the flavours. Hold it at a bare simmer; a rolling boil will tighten and dry both meats, and veal in particular turns stringy fast.
- "1 glass of sherry"Genuinely imprecise. A wine glass in period cookbooks is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, roughly ¼ cup, though larger readings exist. Start at ¼ cup with 1 cup of stock and add more to taste.
- PapricaSimply paprika. In this period it would generally have meant sweet Hungarian paprika rather than the smoked Spanish sort, which would push the dish somewhere quite different.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the standard English sweet-tart condiment for game and veal. Stir it in off the heat at the end so it melts rather than caramelises; a good tart redcurrant jelly is worth seeking out, as grape jelly is far sweeter and flatter.
- StockChicken or veal stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since the jelly and sherry will concentrate as it reduces. Season at the end, after the jelly goes in.
- The mustardA quarter teaspoon of unqualified 'mustard' in a recipe of this date most likely means dry mustard powder, though prepared mustard is possible. If using powder, slake it in a spoonful of the warm stock before adding, or it will sit in lumps.
- CroutonsHere these are toast points or triangles of bread, not the small cubes sold in bags. The recipe says toasted, though period croutons were as often fried in butter; either way, cut a slice diagonally and colour it well.
- Quantities and yieldNo weights are given. A whole cooked chicken plus a few slices of veal, with 1 cup of stock, will probably serve about four; scale the sauce so it coats rather than swims.
Cookbooks that walked a reader through a year of dishes, one nation at a time, are often said to have formed a small publishing genre either side of 1900, and their "national" attributions were often loose ype on the menu card as much as it described a regional tradition. What might make this one plausibly Belgian, or at least Franco-Belgian in spirit, is the combination of sherry and redcurrant jelly in a savoury sauce, though sherry is Spanish and the sweet-sour finish is common across much of northern Europe as well as the Low Countries and northern France, where it has long been used for veal, hare and poultry. It is also, plainly, a recipe for using up yesterday's roast: cold chicken and cold veal reheated in a fortified sauce and served on fried bread, the household economy of the period wrapped in a foreign name.