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FOWL, MINCED (a la Bechamel)
Put a small cupful of bechamel sauce, and the same of white stock, into a stewpan, with the solid white meat of a cold roast fowl, minced; stir well until it boils up, take off immediately, and put it into a dish. The mixture may, if liked, be put in the centre of a dish, and have the sauce poured upon it and potato croquettes arranged around it. Time to simmer in the sauce, two or three minutes. Sufficient for a dish.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast fowl, and one that depends entirely on restraint: the meat is already cooked, so the pan work is a matter of heating through, not stewing.
- The hinge: do not let it cookCold cooked breast meat turns dry and stringy the moment it simmers properly. Bring the sauce to a bare boil, stir the chicken through for the two or three minutes the recipe allows, and take it off the heat.
- A small cupfulVictorian cups were not standardised; read it as roughly 6-8 fl oz (about 175-240 ml) each of sauce and stock. The two together should coat the meat generously without flooding it.
- Bechamel, 1890s styleBechamel, period style -- Victorian bechamel was commonly a white sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux moistened with veal or chicken stock and finished with cream, rather than the plain milk-only sauce the word usually means now. A modern bechamel loosened with stock and enriched with a spoonful of cream gets you there.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock from veal or poultry bones, simmered without roasting the bones first. Unsalted chicken stock is the ready substitute; salt at the end, since reducing sauce concentrates it fast.
- Solid white meatThe instruction excludes skin, gristle and dark meat, which discolour the sauce. Mince rather than shred: a coarse chop by hand, about the size of a pea, holds sauce better than food-processor mush.
- Potato croquettesThe garnish is doing structural work, giving crispness against a soft, pale centre. Any crisp starch serves the same purpose if you are not making croquettes from scratch.
- Yield"Sufficient for a dish" means one entree dish at a multi-course meal. The white meat of a single roast chicken with this quantity of sauce serves two as a main course, four as a starter or luncheon dish.
- StorageCooked poultry that has been chilled should be reheated thoroughly and eaten at once. This preparation does not keep for a second reheating.
Minced fowl in white sauce belongs to the enormous Victorian category of "rechauffes" - made-over dishes built from the remains of yesterday's roast, which in a household that regularly served a whole bird meant a good deal of leftover breast. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton before it, appears to give such dishes their due, partly from thrift and partly because the middle-class table was expected to produce a different entree each day without a second joint being bought. The a la bechamel tag signals the French-derived sauce repertoire that English cookery writers had been absorbing since Carême's influence spread through grand kitchens earlier in the century; by the 1890s, it is often said, a competent cook would keep bechamel and white stock on hand as a matter of routine. The same idea, chopped chicken bound in white sauce, is recognisable in the creamed chicken and chicken a la king of Edwardian and American hotel menus, though the resemblance need not imply direct descent.