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Supreme of Chicken
Breast and second joints of uncooked chicken weighing 4 lbs. 4 eggs 1 1/3 cups thick cream Salt and pepper Force chicken through a meat chopper, or chop very finely. Beat eggs separately, add one at a time, stirring until mixture is smooth. Add cream, and season with salt and pepper. Turn into slightly buttered Dario moulds, and bake same as Lobster Timbales, allowing thirty minutes for baking. Serve with Supreme or Bechamel Sauce.
A chicken mousseline baked in small moulds, in the manner of a timbale or quenelle mixture. The technique is straightforward once the vessel and the water bath are sorted out.
- The hinge: a water bath"Bake same as Lobster Timbales" sends you to the earlier recipe, where the filled moulds are set in a pan of hot water and baked. No temperature is given anywhere; a moderate oven in modern terms is about 325-350F. Baked dry, an egg-and-cream forcemeat is apt to curdle and weep.
- Dario mouldsRead dariole moulds: small straight-sided tinned cups of roughly 3 to 4 fl oz. Ramekins, timbale cups or a muffin tin will do; butter them well and expect to unmould onto the plate.
- Second jointsThe period term for the thigh. So you want the breast and thighs off a 4 lb bird, skin and bone discarded, giving somewhere near 1 1/2 lb of raw meat.
- ChoppingA food processor replaces the meat chopper. Work the meat cold, in short pulses, to a smooth paste before any egg goes in; warm meat and cream will separate.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis means each egg beaten on its own and worked in one at a time, not yolks and whites divided. The point is to keep the emulsion from breaking.
- Thick creamHeavy or double cream. Lighter cream gives a softer, less rich result.
- DonenessThirty minutes suits small moulds. The centres should read 165F and a knife tip come out clean; larger moulds will need longer.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; the quantity will fill roughly ten to twelve small dariole moulds, napped with sauce supreme or bechamel.
Supreme in nineteenth-century professional cookery meant the finest part of the bird -- the breast fillet -- and by extension a delicate white preparation of it, served with a pale velvety sauce of the same name. Turning that meat into a pounded forcemeat bound with egg and cream is the mousseline technique, the same one behind quenelles and timbales, and it was a staple of the entree course in the era when a formal dinner ran through many small dishes rather than one large one. Cookbooks of this kind routinely cross-referenced their own pages for method, so a reader was expected to have already learned the water bath from the lobster timbales.