Home › Meats and Poultry › Chicken en Coquille
Chicken en Coquille
Boil chicken in water or broth. Cut the meat into small dice and mix hot with a hot Bechamel sauce. Place in shells, sprinkle over cracker crumbs with bits of butter, and brown in hot oven.
Mushrooms added to the chicken improve them.-Mrs R. P. Bishop, Los Angeles.
A late-Victorian way of stretching leftover boiled fowl into an individually portioned first course. The recipe assumes you already know how to make Bechamel and own a set of shells, so both need filling in.
- Coquille means the shell"En coquille" refers to natural scallop shells or the metal and porcelain imitations sold for the purpose. Individual gratin dishes, shallow ramekins or 6 oz custard cups do the same job; count on about 1/2 cup of filling each.
- Bechamel quantityThe original gives none. For the meat of one 4 lb chicken (roughly 3 to 4 cups diced), make about 2 cups of sauce: 4 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp flour, 2 cups hot milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg. The mixture should mound softly, not pour.
- A period Bechamel is richer than oursA period Bechamel is looser than the modern definition -- cookbooks of the era not uncommonly build the sauce on part milk and part of the chicken broth, sometimes finished with a little cream or an egg yolk. Using some of the poaching liquid helps keep the dish from tasting of flour and milk alone.
- Poach, do not boilA hard boil toughens breast meat and squeezes it dry. Bring the bird to a bare simmer and hold it there until the thigh reads 175F; the breast will be done well before that, and the resulting broth is the point of the exercise.
- Oven heat"hot oven" in books of this period is generally taken as roughly 400 to 450F. The filling goes in hot, so the shells need only 10 to 15 minutes to brown the crumbs; a slower oven will dry the sauce before the top colors.
- Cracker crumbsCoarsely crushed soda crackers or common crackers, not fine dry breadcrumbs. Panko is a rough modern stand-in, though the texture is not the same. Dot generously with butter or the crumbs will scorch rather than brown.
- MushroomsSaute sliced mushrooms in butter until their liquid has cooked off before folding them in. Added raw they will thin the sauce in the oven.
- YieldOn the proportions above one boiled chicken makes about five to six cups of filling, which at half a cup a shell will fill ten or twelve; scale down or serve larger portions to feed six as a light main course with a salad.
Serving a creamed mixture in a scallop shell was one of the standard tricks of American genteel cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, applied to oysters, crab, salmon, sweetbreads and, as here, boiled fowl. The French name did the work of making an economical dish of leftovers look like a course from a restaurant menu, and the individual shells suited the multi-course dinners of the period, where each guest received a small portion rather than a platter. This entry also shows how such collections were assembled: contributions were solicited from readers by name and town, and the writers assumed a shared working knowledge of the mother sauces, so Bechamel is named without proportions and the amount of chicken is left entirely to the cook. Mrs Bishop closes with a note that mushrooms "improve them."