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CANNELONS (a la Poulette)
Take the remains of cold chicken and half the quantity of cold ham; mince and mix them thoroughly with a little good white sauce. Roll out some good light paste about a quarter of an inch in thickness, cut it into pieces two inches long and one inch wide. Place a little of the mixture on half of these pieces, and with the others cover each one; press the edges, and round them. Fry them in hot fat. Drain, and serve on a napkin. Time to fry, a minute or two, till they are lightly browned. Probable cost, 1/2d. each, exclusive of the cold meat.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast chicken and ham: minced meat bound in white sauce, sealed in pastry and deep-fried. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the filling being cold and stiff before it goes near the pastry.
- Chill the filling firstMix the mince with just enough white sauce to bind — a few tablespoons to a cupful of meat — then refrigerate until firm. A loose, warm filling softens the pastry and blows the seams open in the fat.
- "Good light paste"In Cassell's this most likely means puff or rough puff pastry. All-butter shop-bought puff, rolled to a scant 1/4 inch, behaves as intended.
- Frying temperatureThe original just says hot fat. Aim for 350–360F: hot enough that the pastry puffs and colours in the minute or two specified, not so hot that the outside browns before the layers set.
- SealingBrush the border with water or egg white, press firmly, and trim the edges with a cutter or knife. Any gap lets fat in and filling out.
- ProportionsTwo parts chicken to one part ham, by the recipe. Something like 8 oz chicken and 4 oz ham will fill a batch of these two-inch cannelons, though the recipe gives no quantities and the yield depends on how generously they are filled.
- "Serve on a napkin"A folded linen napkin on the dish caught frying fat at table. Drain on paper towels instead, and serve straight away — they do not stay crisp long.
- À la pouletteThe name usually signals a velouté finished with egg yolk and lemon. If you want to honour it, thicken the binding sauce with a yolk and sharpen it with lemon juice before chilling.
- CostA halfpenny each in period money, excluding the meat — the point of the dish was that the meat was already paid for.
Cannelon comes from the French for a small pipe or rolled thing, and in nineteenth-century English cookery books it covers almost anything savoury rolled or enclosed in pastry and fried. Dishes of this kind carried the Victorian middle-class kitchen from Sunday's roast through the rest of the week: a joint of chicken and a boiled ham were expected to reappear as rissoles, croquettes, patties and cannelons until they were gone. The phrase à la poulette is generally traced to the classic French white sauce enriched with egg yolk and lemon, though here, as often in English books of the period, it is used loosely to mean little more than "in a creamy white sauce." The costing in halfpence, given for nearly every entry in the dictionary, was aimed squarely at the mistress of a household keeping accounts.