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FOWL SCALLOPS (a la Bechamel)
Roast a couple of fine fowls, and when done, remove them from the spit. Cut with a sharp knife all the flesh in one piece from the breasts and wings. Pull off the skin, and slice the meat thinly into small scallops, which arrange on a hot dish. Sprinkle lightly with salt, and pour boiling sauce (bechamel) over. If cold fowls be used, dip the scallops one by one into clarified butter and fry but do not brown. Drain off the butter, and pile in the middle of a hot dish. Sauce as above. Time, four minutes to fry. Probable cost, exclusive of fowls, 8d. Sufficient for an entree.
A Victorian way of turning roast chicken into a proper entrée: thin slices of breast and wing meat under a hot béchamel. The whole dish stands or falls on the sauce being poured boiling over meat that is already hot.
- "Fowl" means chickenA fowl in this book is a table chicken, typically a boiling or roasting bird of a few pounds. Two birds give the breast and wing meat of two modern 3½ lb chickens; the recipe says only that this is "sufficient for an entree" and gives no number of covers.
- Roast without the spitThe recipe gives no temperature. In place of the spit, roast in a modern oven at about 400F until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F, roughly an hour for a 3½ lb bird. Rest it 15 minutes before carving or the slices will shed juice into the sauce.
- Scallops, not shellfishA scallop here is an escalope: a thin, broad slice cut across the grain. Take the breast off the bone in one piece as directed and slice on a slight bias, about ⅛ inch thick.
- The béchamel of the periodVictorian béchamel was a white roux let down with milk and often good veal or chicken stock, then reduced with cream. A modern all-milk béchamel is thinner in flavour; use half stock, and season firmly, since the meat is salted only lightly.
- Boiling sauce, hot dishThis is the hinge. The scallops are not cooked in the sauce, so both meat and platter must be hot and the sauce must be poured at a boil. Sauce below simmering over cool slices gives a tepid, congealing dish.
- Clarified butter for cold fowlClarified butter is used because the milk solids in whole butter brown well before four minutes are up, and browning is expressly not wanted here. Keep the pan at moderate heat and turn the slices once.
- Time and donenessFour minutes is for reheating already-cooked meat, not for cooking it through. Cold chicken held longer than that in a pan dries out badly.
- CostThe 8d is for the sauce and butter; the fowls, then the expensive part, are excluded, as the recipe's "probable cost, exclusive of fowls" states.
Béchamel is one of the French mother sauces, traditionally traced to the household of Louis XIV and named for Louis de Béchameil, his maître d'hôtel, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the sauce almost certainly predates him. Its arrival in English kitchens by way of nineteenth-century French-trained cooks explains the "à la Béchamel" tag that Cassell's attaches to other entries. The recipe also shows the economy of a large Victorian household, since its second half turns cold fowl into an entrée, sliced thin, warmed in butter and dressed in a white sauce so that nothing on the plate announces itself as leftovers -- though the first and principal method uses birds roasted for the purpose and served hot.