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Fowl, Minced, with Mushrooms
Take a quarter of a pound of mushrooms, rub them with salt, and chop finely. Simmer them in a saucepan for ten minutes with half a pint of milk. Remove all skin and gristle from the remains of a cooked fowl, and cut the meat into small pieces. Take the mushrooms out of the milk and put them with the fowl. Mix half an ounce of flour with a table-spoonful of milk, and pour the boiling milk on to it, stirring well. Return it to the saucepan, and stir over the fire till nicely thickened; then put in the fowl and the mushrooms, and let them heat slowly by the side of the fire. Season with pepper and salt, and serve very hot. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
A Victorian way with cold roast chicken: a thin bechamel built on mushroom-infused milk, with the meat warmed through rather than cooked again. The whole point is gentle heat at the end.
- Do not boil the fowlAlready-cooked chicken added to a simmering sauce turns stringy within a few minutes. "Heat slowly by the side of the fire" means the coolest part of the range; on a modern hob, the lowest setting or the residual heat of a pan pulled off the burner, five minutes at most.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is the British 20 fl oz pint, so 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. A quarter pound of mushrooms is roughly 115 g, and half an ounce of flour is about 15 g, near enough two level tablespoons.
- Rubbing with saltA common treatment in Victorian books for field mushrooms, whose skins peel readily and which often carried grit and sand. Cultivated button or chestnut mushrooms need only a wipe; salting them now simply draws out water, which is no bad thing if you want a concentrated milk.
- The milk infusionTen minutes of simmering is there to flavour the milk, not to cook the mushrooms tender. Expect the milk to grey slightly and to reduce a little; top it back up to the original volume before making the sauce, or the thickening will be too stiff.
- The thickening methodThis is a slurry rather than a roux, which is why the flour is slaked with cold milk first. Pour the hot milk in slowly while whisking, then return to the pan; the flour needs a good two or three minutes of simmering to lose its raw taste before the chicken goes in.
- SeasoningA flour-and-milk sauce this plain needs more salt than seems reasonable, and the recipe gives none until the end. A grating of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon at the finish is period-appropriate and lifts it considerably.
- Yield and servingThe carcass of a small roast chicken gives roughly 350 g of picked meat, which with this quantity of sauce serves three or four. Minces of this kind were often served in a border of mashed potato, on toast, or in pastry cases; any of those still works.
- The cost lineThree shillings and sixpence assumes you are buying the fowl. Made from genuine leftovers, as the wording implies, the outlay is the mushrooms and the milk.
Cassell's was written for households that roasted a fowl on Sunday and were expected to account for every scrap of it afterwards, and the phrase "the remains of a cooked fowl" recurs throughout the book. Minces, rissoles, croquettes and creamed dishes like this one belonged to a whole genre of second-day cookery that the Victorian household manuals are often said to have treated as a test of a cook's competence rather than a confession of thrift. The technique itself is a plain white sauce enriched by infusion; mushrooms were a natural partner because they were cheap and abundant in season, gathered from pasture as often as bought.