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Creamed Chicken
One chicken of four and one-half pounds or two of six pounds, four sweetbreads, and one can of mushrooms.
Boil chicken and sweetbreads, and when cold cut up as for salad. In a saucepan put four coffeecups or one quart of cream; in another four large tablespoons of butter and five even ones of flour.
Stir the latter until melted, then pour on the hot cream, stirring until it thickens; add and stir in a small half of a grated onion and a very little nutmeg, and season highly with black and red pepper.
Put chicken and ingredients together, with sweetbreads and mushrooms (which if large should be cut in four pieces), in a baking dish, cover with bread crumbs and piece of butter, and bake twenty minutes. It can be made without sweetbreads by using more chicken, but it is not so good. - Mrs Edgar E. Bartlett, Rockford.
A late-Victorian company dish scaled for a crowd, and the quantities are meant literally: a quart of cream and four sweetbreads make roughly a gallon of finished food. Read the sweetbread handling before you shop, since it is the only part that needs planning.
- Coffeecup measure"Four coffeecups or one quart of cream" tells you the book's coffeecup is about a cup, so read it as 4 cups. Heavy or whipping cream suits the dish; period "cream" was gravity-separated and varied a good deal in richness, so treat the fat percentage as a judgement call rather than a fixed equivalence.
- Sweetbreads firstSweetbreads are veal thymus or pancreas and must be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours, then simmered gently 15-20 minutes, drained, cooled, and peeled of membrane before dicing. Order them ahead; most supermarkets do not stock them, and a butcher will need notice.
- Boiling the chickenA 4 1/2 lb bird needs about an hour at a bare simmer, until the thigh reads 175F. Cool it in its own broth for moist meat, then pull the flesh in salad-sized pieces rather than shredding it.
- The sauce ratioFour tablespoons butter to five tablespoons flour thickening a full quart of cream gives a fairly loose sauce, which is correct here since the crumbs and 20 minutes in the oven will tighten it. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding the hot cream, or the flour will taste raw.
- Grated onion and nutmeg"A small half of a grated onion" means about two tablespoons of onion pulp, grated on the fine side of a box grater so it dissolves into the sauce. The nutmeg and the two peppers are the whole seasoning scheme; cayenne is the "red pepper," and it should be present but not identifiable.
- Canned mushrooms"One can" is not a fixed measure; around 8 oz drained is a reasonable working reading. Canned mushrooms of the period were commonly whole buttons in brine. Drain and rinse them if you use canned; 8 oz of fresh mushrooms sauteed dry until they stop weeping is closer to what the dish wants and will not water the sauce.
- OvenNo temperature is given; few home ranges of the period had a reliable oven thermometer, and heat was judged by hand. Bake at 375F for the stated 20 minutes, which is long enough to brown the crumbs and heat a shallow dish through. In a deep casserole, everything should already be hot when it goes in.
- YieldAs written this serves 10 to 12 as a main course. Halving it is straightforward, and the recipe's own note is sound: dropping the sweetbreads costs the dish most of its character.
Creamed chicken in some form appears again and again in American community cookbooks between about 1880 and 1920, because it solved the hostess's problem exactly: a boiled fowl, a rich white sauce and an oven dish could be assembled in advance and served to a large table without carving. What dates this version is the sweetbreads. Veal offal was a genuine delicacy in the period, appearing in chafing-dish suppers, wedding breakfasts and club luncheons, and its texture beside the diced chicken was the point of the extravagance -- hence Mrs. Bartlett's aside that the dish can be made without them but is not so good. The attribution itself is typical of the form: subscription cookbooks were compiled from members' contributions, each signed with a name and a town, so the book doubles as a register of who cooked what in places like Rockford.