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GAME PANADA (Invalid Cookery)
Boil some game, such as a young pheasant or a young partridge, until it is three-parts cooked. Take off the skin, pick the flesh from the bones, and pound it in a mortar with a little of the liquid in which it was boiled, the crumb of a French roll, and a little salt, grated nutmeg, and rasped lemon-rind. When beaten to a paste, put it into a saucepan, with a little more of the liquid, and let it simmer for ten minutes. It should be as thick as good melted butter. Time, about one hour to prepare. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the game. Sufficient, a few spoonfuls may be given to an invalid.
A soft, pounded meat gruel from the invalid-cookery pages, meant to be swallowed with minimal effort. The two things that decide whether it works are the consistency and the sieving.
- "As thick as good melted butter"In Victorian books "melted butter" is not melted butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly the consistency of pouring cream or a thin bechamel. That is your target: it should coat a spoon and slide off, not mound.
- The French rollA small, light white yeast roll; only the crumb (the soft interior, no crust) is used. Reckon on about 1 oz / 30 g of torn crumb per small bird, added dry so it swells in the cooking liquid.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but it will not remove sinew or the fine shot-damaged fragments. Pushing the paste through a fine sieve afterwards will catch them; the recipe itself calls only for pounding in a mortar.
- Cook the bird through'Three-parts cooked' means about three-quarters done, the bird being destined for further cooking; but poached poultry and game should reach 74C / 165F. The ten-minute simmer at the end should finish it, provided the pot genuinely simmers rather than sits warm.
- Game and substitutesA young pheasant or partridge is mild and tender; older birds give a stronger, tougher paste. Boneless chicken thigh or leg meat behaves almost identically here and is easier to buy. Use the poaching liquid, not water, for the final thinning.
- Seasoning restraint"A little salt, grated nutmeg, and rasped lemon-rind" means a pinch, a scrape and the zest of no more than a quarter lemon. The dish was designed for a dulled appetite, not a bold one, and lemon rind turns bitter if the white pith goes in.
- TimingAn hour is realistic: 25-35 minutes to poach a small bird, then picking, pounding, sieving and the final simmer. Made ahead, it thickens on standing and will need loosening with more of the cooking liquid.
- YieldOne small bird gives considerably more than the 'few spoonfuls' prescribed for an invalid at a sitting. Scale down, or keep the surplus refrigerated no more than two days and reheat only what is needed.
Panada takes its name from the Italian and Spanish words for bread pap (from Latin panis), and in older English cookery it meant bread simmered in liquid to a smooth pulp, sometimes plain, sometimes enriched with meat as here. It sits in the invalid-cookery tradition because before the twentieth century the sickroom was a recognised branch of the kitchen: convalescents, the very old and the newly delivered were fed a graded ladder of beef teas, arrowroot, jellies and panadas thought to be nourishing without taxing the digestion. Game was regarded as especially suitable, being reckoned lighter and more digestible than butcher's meat, and the recipe prices the bread and seasonings at fourpence while leaving the bird out of the calculation, as was common house practice with principal ingredients of variable price. The dietary theory behind such dishes has not survived, but the technique has: meat pounded, sieved and thinned with its own cooking liquor.