Edmund Breese
CHICKEN A LA BREESE
1 cup cooked chicken cut in strips 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 3 cold boiled potatoes cut 1½ cups scalded milk in slices Salt, pepper to taste 1 truffle cut in strips Make a sauce of butter, flour and milk.
Add chicken, potatoes and truffle.
As soon as thoroughly heated, add seasoning.
Yours with best wishes, Dundeese.
A plain creamed chicken, of the kind that used a Sunday bird's leftovers and a boiled potato or two. The ingredient list is laid out in two columns in the original, which is why the lines read oddly when set as running text.
- Reading the ingredient listThe columns have collided: it should be 1 cup cooked chicken cut in strips, 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups scalded milk, 3 cold boiled potatoes cut in slices, salt and pepper, and 1 truffle cut in strips. Nothing is missing, only scrambled.
- The sauce is the whole dishEqual butter and flour to 1½ cups milk gives a medium white sauce. Cook the roux two or three minutes over low heat before the milk goes in, or the finished dish tastes of raw flour, which is the usual failure here.
- Scalded milkHeating the milk to just below a simmer before adding it was standard practice and still helps the sauce come together without lumps. Add it in stages, whisking.
- Season at the end, as writtenThe recipe adds salt and pepper only once the dish is thoroughly heated.
- Heat, do not simmerOnce the cooked chicken goes in it needs only to warm through, three or four minutes. Held at a simmer, already-poached chicken breast turns dry and stringy.
- The truffleIn 1916 this most likely meant a small canned black truffle. A tablespoon of truffle paste, or 3-4 oz of sauteed cremini with a spoonful of sherry, keeps the dish in proportion without the expense.
- Yield and servingServes two as a main course, three or four spooned over toast points, split biscuits or in patty shells.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916) collected recipes solicited from stage performers, and the appeal was the signature as much as the food: Edmund Breese, a Brooklyn-born actor best known for his work in The Lion and the Mouse, signs off here as "Dundeese." The dish itself is creamed chicken, a staple of American middle-class cookery in this period -- a white sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux, carrying whatever cold meat the house had. The truffle is the theatrical touch: canned truffles were sold in groceries handling imported goods, an inexpensive-seeming flourish for a supper of leftovers.