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Bouchées à la Reine
Ingredients.
Half a minced Chicken. 1 Two ounces of minced Ham.
Six minced Mushrooms.
Three minced Truffles.
Half a pint of White Sauce.
One gill of Cream.
Yolks of two Eggs.
Cases made with puff paste, either baked like vol-au-vent cases, small, or line some little moulds, which should be filled with rice before baking, to prevent them from rising too much. Next put the sauce into a stewpan, with chicken, ham, etc.; when it is quite hot add the cream, and lastly stir in the yolks of eggs, which must be cooked but not curdled; fill this into the patty cases, and serve.
A late-Victorian chicken and truffle ragout bound with an egg-yolk liaison, spooned into puff pastry cases. Everything here is straightforward except the finish, which is where it can be lost.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil, or it will scramble into grains. Take the pan off the heat, stir in the yolks beaten with a little of the hot sauce, then return it to low heat only until it thickens visibly and coats a spoon, around 175-180F.
- Gills and pintsThis is a British book: a gill is 5 fl oz (about 2/3 US cup) and half a pint is 10 fl oz (1 1/4 US cups). Measured in US cups the filling is roughly 1 1/4 cups sauce to 2/3 cup cream.
- "White sauce" hereIn a kitchen of this kind it is most likely a velouté, chicken stock thickened with a white roux and well reduced, rather than a milk béchamel; the recipe does not say which. Made with milk the filling can taste flat against the ham and truffle.
- "Minced"Finely chopped. Mincing machines existed by this date, but what is wanted here is distinct small pieces of chicken, ham, mushroom and truffle suspended in the sauce, not a paste, so chop by knife rather than reaching for a food processor.
- Baking the casesPuff paste wants a hot oven, 425F, for 15-20 minutes until risen and dry through. The rice is a blind-baking weight for the lined moulds; line the pastry with paper first or the grains embed themselves.
- TrufflesThree truffles is a lavish quantity by present-day standards; the recipe does not say whether fresh or preserved, and tinned truffle was widely used in kitchens of this class. A small jar of preserved truffle, or a teaspoon of truffle paste stirred in at the end, gets the intention; otherwise leave them out and add more mushroom rather than substituting truffle oil, which reads quite differently.
- Chicken and hamHalf a chicken means the cooked meat of half a bird, about 8-10 oz — poached or roast leftovers are ideal. The ham should be a firm cooked ham, cut in small dice rather than shaved.
- Yield and servingEnough to fill about 8 large or 16 small cases, an entrée for six to eight. Fill at the last moment and serve at once: the sauce softens the pastry within minutes.
Bouchée means "mouthful," and à la reine — "in the queen's style" — was nineteenth-century kitchen shorthand for a creamy white chicken ragout, the same filling that goes into a full-sized vol-au-vent à la reine. The name is traditionally linked to Marie Leszczyńska, queen to Louis XV, though that attribution is repeated rather than documented; by the 1800s the label appears to have settled into the professional repertoire as a description of the sauce, not a royal recipe. Puff-pastry cases filled at the last moment were exactly the sort of dish a trained cook was expected to produce for the entrée course: made in advance in parts, assembled in minutes, and rich with the two luxuries — truffle and cream — that signalled a good table. Books of this class were written for cooks in large private households and for the schools that trained them, which may be why the sauce is named in three words and left at that.