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CHICKEN, PANADA (Invalid Cookery)
Take a fresh young chicken, and boil it, until quite tender, in sufficient water to cover it. Take off all the meat from the bones, and pound it in a mortar until quite smooth, with a little of the liquid it was boiled in, and add some salt, nutmeg, and a very little grated lemon-rind. Boil this gently for a few minutes with sufficient liquid to make it of the consistency of thick custard. Time, twenty-five minutes to boil the chicken. Probable cost, chicken, 2s. 6d. A very little of this contains a great deal of nourishment.
A pounded chicken cream from the invalid-cookery pages, meant to deliver concentrated protein in a spoonful. The whole point is smoothness, so the sieving and thinning matter more than anything else.
- The hinge: textureNothing lumpy or stringy may remain, since this was fed to people who could barely chew. The recipe itself asks only for pounding in a mortar "until quite smooth"; pushing the blitzed meat through a fine sieve is the modern equivalent, catching the sinew and skin fragments a blender leaves behind.
- Mortar to machineA food processor does in half a minute what the original expects from prolonged pounding; the recipe sets no time for it, only "until quite smooth". Add the cooking liquid a spoonful at a time or the meat pastes up rather than loosening.
- Cooking timeTwenty-five minutes at a bare simmer suits a very small bird of a pound or two. A modern 3-4 lb chicken needs 50-60 minutes, and the thigh meat should read 165F before you strip the bones.
- "Fresh young chicken"A spring chicken or poussin rather than the mature boiling fowl used for stock. A whole poussin, or two bone-in chicken thighs plus a breast, gives the same tenderness.
- Consistency of thick custardAim for something that coats a spoon and drops from it slowly, roughly 1 cup of liquid to 1 cup of pounded meat. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so leave it slightly loose.
- Seasoning restraint"A very little grated lemon-rind" means a pinch at most, and only the outer zest, since the pith underneath is bitter. Grate the nutmeg fresh. Note that the recipe seasons at the pounding stage, before the liquid is added.
- Final boiling"Boil this gently" means a low simmer with constant stirring. Held at a rolling boil the protein tightens and weeps water, and the smoothness you worked for breaks.
- Yield and keepingA poussin gives about two cups, six to eight invalid servings. Chill at once and use within two days; reheat only what you serve, gently, thinning with a little more of the broth.
- The cost note2s. 6d. was the price of a chicken in late-Victorian Britain, not a figure with any modern use. It does tell you that a whole bird spent on one bedridden person was a real household expense.
Panada takes its name from Latin panis, bread (Spanish pan, Italian pane): originally a pap of bread boiled in broth or water, one of the oldest sickroom foods in Europe and still made that way in French and Italian kitchens. By the nineteenth century English cookery books had extended the word to any smooth invalid pulp of this consistency, bread or not, and chicken panada became a standard of the genre alongside beef tea and arrowroot gruel. Its logic belongs to a period before intravenous feeding or commercial supplements, when nursing a fever or a long convalescence meant getting nourishment into someone who could not manage solid food, and when concentrated meat in any form was believed to be strengthening in itself. It appears under the heading "Invalid Cookery": the recipes there are short, bland, and judged almost entirely by how easily they go down.