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Chicken, Minced
Take the remains of a cold chicken, cut off all the meat, and mince it finely. Put a breakfast-cupful of white stock into a saucepan, thicken it with a little flour, and let it boil for twenty minutes; then add half a dozen mushrooms chopped small, half a pint of cream or new milk, a little salt, pepper, and pounded mace, and the minced chicken. When the mushrooms are cooked, serve as quickly as possible, with toasted sippets round the dish. Time, forty minutes. Probable cost, 8d., if made with milk, exclusive of the cold chicken. Sufficient for three persons.
A late-Victorian way of using up the last of a roast bird: essentially a velout ed with cream, with the meat warmed through at the end. The whole thing hangs on that last step.
- Add the chicken last, and do not boil itAdd the chicken with the mushrooms and cream, as the recipe directs, and do not let it boil hard -- the meat is already cooked, and anything more than warming through in the hot sauce will squeeze it dry and stringy. Keep the pan just below a simmer while the mushrooms finish.
- A breakfast-cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fl oz, i.e. about a cup. Breakfast cups varied by household, so treat it as a starting point and judge the sauce by consistency rather than volume.
- Half a pint of cream or milkThis is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1 e0 US cups e broth. Single cream or whole milk both work; double cream will need thinning as it reduces.
- Thicken it with a little flourAround 1 oz flour to the cup of stock gives a coating sauce, which will thin again when the half-pint of cream or milk goes in. Cook it out properly -- plausibly what the twenty minutes' boiling is for -- otherwise the sauce tastes raw and pasty. A blond roux or a beurre manie folded in works better than flour stirred into hot liquid.
- MushroomsHalf a dozen implies small ones; modern mushrooms are often larger, so judge by volume rather than by count and chop them finely. Five minutes in the sauce is enough.
- Pounded maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Ground mace from a jar is fine o a good pinch o r a smaller pinch of grated nutmeg in its place.
- SippetsTriangles or fingers of toasted bread, arranged point-outward around the rim of the dish. Cut and toast them while the sauce finishes, or they go leathery.
- Yield and timingThree servings as stated, as a light supper or luncheon dish. The forty minutes is nearly all sauce-making; once the chicken goes in, it needs to reach the table quickly.
Minced chicken of this kind belongs to the great Victorian economy of leftovers, where a Sunday roast was expected to reappear on Monday and Tuesday in a different guise. The costing in pence -- 8d. exclusive of the cold chicken -- reflects that the meat is already paid for; the outlay is stock, flour, milk and a few mushrooms. The technique is a domesticated veloute, the white sauce that French kitchens built on veal or chicken stock, simplified for a cook working without a brigade. Sippets -- the word is old, usually explained as a diminutive of 'sip', possibly influenced by 'sop' -- served the same purpose as toast points do now: they gave a soft, saucy dish something to push against.