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Fowl, Blanquette Of
Put into a stewpan half a pint of white sauce and a quarter of a pint of broth; when boiling, add some neat pieces of cold fowl and slices of tongue boiled, season with pepper and salt, cover closely, and let the fowl get hot in the sauce, but do not let it boil. Five minutes before serving stir in the well-beaten yolks of two eggs and about one table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. One fowl is sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's roast chicken: cold meat warmed in a white sauce that is thickened at the last moment with egg yolks and sharpened with lemon. The whole dish depends on the sauce never reaching a boil.
- The hinge: no boilingOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer — roughly 160-180F. Boiling scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into curds and liquid. Keep the pan on low heat, or pull it off the burner entirely and let residual heat do the work.
- Temper the yolksBeat the two yolks in a bowl, whisk in a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce, then stir that mixture back into the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to hot sauce is the usual cause of failure here.
- UnitsHalf a pint of white sauce is 10 fl oz in Imperial measure, so about 1¼ cups; a quarter pint of broth is a generous ½ cup. An Imperial gill is 5 fl oz. The measures are forgiving — you want enough liquid to just cover the meat.
- White sauceThe book means a flour-and-butter sauce made with milk, or better here, a velouté made with chicken stock. A thin béchamel works; keep it on the loose side, since the yolks will thicken it considerably.
- Cold fowlThe recipe means leftover cooked bird. Use leftover roast or poached chicken cut in neat, even pieces — uniform size matters more than shape, so everything comes up to temperature together.
- Boiled tongueSalt-cured ox or lamb tongue, commonly sold cooked and pressed by Victorian butchers, is now hard to find outside specialist shops. Thin slices of good ham or a mild cured bacon give the same salty counterpoint.
- Reheating cooked meatThe chicken should be thoroughly hot in the sauce before the yolks go in, which takes a while at this gentle heat; keep the lid on. Add the lemon juice at the very end, as acid in the sauce early on encourages curdling.
- Yield and servingFour portions, as stated. A border of boiled rice or plain mashed potato suits it, with the sauce spooned over.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white, and names any stew deliberately kept pale — no browning of the meat, no coloured stock, the sauce finished with a liaison of egg yolk and often cream or lemon. Veal is the classic subject, but English cookery books of the later nineteenth century applied the term freely to chicken, rabbit and lamb, often, it seems, as a way of dignifying reheated leftovers. That is exactly its function in Cassell's: the fowl has already been boiled or roasted for an earlier meal, and the blanquette turns the remains into something that can be sent to table in its own right. The egg-and-lemon finish is worth noting as a technique with a very long reach — the same thickening appears in Greek avgolemono and in Turkish and Persian cooking, and in all of them the same rule holds: heat it too far and it curdles.