Martha Hedman
CHICKEN PASTIES
Use one cupful of chopped mushrooms to four cupfuls of cold, minced chicken. Add one and a half cups of white sauce, the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, one teaspoon of onion juice and one of minced parsley.
Salt and Gebhardt's Chili Powder to taste. Make into cakes; dip in egg whites then in crumbs and fry in deep, hot fat or olive oil.
This is one of my prime favorites.
Sincerely yours,
A croquette in all but name, built on leftover roast chicken. The first line of the page is a stray fragment from the preceding recipe in the book and has nothing to do with these pasties.
- White sauceA béchamel: 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups milk. Make it stiffer than you would for a sauce, since it is the only thing binding the mixture.
- Chill before shapingThis is the hinge. Fold the egg yolks into the hot sauce, combine with the chicken, then spread the mixture on a tray and refrigerate at least two hours until firm. Warm or soft mixture will burst in the fat and the pasties will collapse.
- Gebhardt's Chili PowderA San Antonio blend, still sold, mild and cumin-forward rather than hot. Any mild commercial chili powder works; start with half a teaspoon for this quantity.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or use a teaspoon of very finely grated onion. Chopped onion will not soften in the brief frying time.
- MushroomsCook the chopped mushrooms dry in a little butter until they stop giving off liquid before adding them, or the moisture will loosen the mixture.
- Egg whites for coatingThe whites alone give a thinner, paler crust than whole beaten egg. Whisk them just until loose, not frothy. For a sturdier coat, use a whole egg with a spoonful of water.
- Frying375F for 2 to 3 minutes, until deep gold. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only crisping the crust and heating through. Fry three or four at a time so the oil does not drop below 350F.
This comes from a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the celebrity cookbook, in which stage and screen performers contributed a favorite dish, here closing with a signed "Sincerely yours." Martha Hedman was a Swedish-born actress who came to Broadway in the 1910s and appeared in a handful of silent films. The dish itself is a standard American croquette of the period, when a thick white sauce was the household solution to leftover meat, and calling it a "pastie" reflects loose usage rather than any relation to the Cornish pasty. The named brand, Gebhardt's chili powder, was produced in San Antonio and is generally traced to the 1890s.