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PANADA, CHICKEN (Invalid Cookery)
Take the white meat off a cold boiled chicken, and pound it to a paste in a mortar with a little of the water the fowl was boiled in. Season with a little salt and nutmeg, and a few drops of lemon-juice. Add some more of the liquor, and boil it gently for a few minutes to the desired consistency. It should not be too thick to drink. This can often be taken when the stomach rejects solid food.
A thin drinkable chicken purée from the invalid-cookery chapter, and one of the simplest things in the book: pounded breast meat loosened with its own cooking liquor. A blender does in seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes.
- PanadaThe word most often means a bread paste, soaked in milk or water, used to bind forcemeat, and it was also used for bread gruels fed to invalids; here the name is applied to a smooth, sippable purée of meat. Nothing bready goes into it.
- Use the poaching liquorThe whole flavour rests on the water the fowl was boiled in; the recipe says nothing about how that bird was cooked or seasoned. Unsalted chicken stock is the nearest substitute; season at the end, as reduction concentrates the salt.
- Pounding, and the alternativeA mortar breaks the muscle fibre down a long way, which is why the result drinks rather than sits in lumps. A blender or small food processor gives a comparable texture; pass the result through a fine sieve if it is going to someone who is genuinely ill and swallowing with difficulty.
- Nutmeg and lemonBoth are there to lift a plain, faintly bland liquid rather than to be tasted as such. The recipe asks only for a little nutmeg and a few drops of juice; more lemon will curdle nothing but will dominate.
- The boilingOnly a few minutes' gentle boiling is called for, to bring it together, heat it through and reach the consistency wanted. Long simmering tightens the already-cooked protein and makes the purée grainy, and it will thicken further as it cools, so stop while it still pours freely.
- Food safety, plainlyThis is cooked chicken reheated in stock, so bring it to a full simmer before serving and do not hold it warm for hours. Make it in small quantities and discard what is not drunk.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. The breast meat of one small bird with roughly a pint of liquor would make two to three cupfuls, which by sickroom standards would be several servings.
Nineteenth-century household manuals commonly carry a chapter of "invalid cookery" or "cookery for the sick", and Cassell's is no exception. Before intravenous feeding, keeping a patient nourished through a long fever meant getting nutrition into liquid form, and the belief of the day was that meat pounded and suspended in its own broth carried the "strength" of the flesh in a form a weak stomach could absorb. That physiology was mistaken in its details, but the practical instinct was sound, and the descendants of these preparations are still on hospital menus as purée and full-liquid diets. The line "it should not be too thick to drink" is the tell: the dish is defined by the patient's capacity, not the cook's taste.