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Crême de Volaille
Ingredients.
Half a pound of the meat from the breasts of two raw Fowls.
One pint of Double Cream.
Pepper and Salt to taste.
Pound the meat in a mortar, add pepper and salt to taste, and pass it all through a hair-sieve. Then add one pint of double cream, half whipped, mix these well together, and steam in a wellbuttered mould very slowly for half an hour. It is best to try a little of the mixture in a pattypan first, and if it is too stiff, add a little more Turn out and serve with Béchamel sauce poured round; the sauce should be made with chicken stock. cream.
This is a chicken mousseline — raw breast meat, cream and seasoning, set gently by steam. Two things decide whether it works: the mixture must stay cold while you work it, and the heat must stay low enough that the cream never breaks.
- The garbled last lineThe typesetting has slipped. The sentence should read: if the test portion is too stiff, add a little more cream. The stray "cream." at the end of the paragraph belongs there.
- Mortar and hair-sieveA food processor does the pounding in under a minute; pulse the cold diced breast to a smooth paste, then push it through a fine drum sieve or the finest mesh strainer you own with a plastic scraper. The sieving is not optional — it removes sinew and is what makes the finished cream silky rather than fibrous.
- Double creamBritish double cream is about 48% butterfat. American heavy cream at 36% will set, but the result is looser and more likely to weep; if you can find manufacturing cream at 40% or more, use it. "Half whipped" means thickened to a soft ribbon that just holds a trail, not to peaks.
- Keep it coldChill the bowl, the blade and the cream. Warm chicken paste and warm cream separate when heated, and no amount of gentle steaming will bring them back.
- The pattypan testA pattypan is a small shallow tartlet tin. Poach or steam a teaspoon of the mixture, taste it for salt, and judge the texture; a stiff mixture cannot be corrected once it is in the mould.
- Steaming and temperatureButter a plain mould or individual dariole moulds and cover with buttered paper or foil. The recipe calls for steaming, and slowly: keep the water at a bare simmer (a covered bain-marie is an equivalent modern substitute, though the book does not specify an oven). Half an hour suits a small mould; a single large one may take 45 minutes. It is done when the centre reaches 165F and the surface is just set -- pushed harder, the cream curdles and beads.
- The sauceBéchamel built on chicken stock rather than milk is what we would now call a velouté. Keep it thin enough to pool around the turned-out cream rather than coat it.
- YieldHalf a pound of breast meat with a pint of cream serves four to six as an entrée, or eight in small darioles.
Crème de volaille -- literally "cream of fowl" -- belongs to the family of forcemeats and mousselines that French professional cookery refined through the nineteenth century, and that British high-class kitchens took up for the entrée course. The principle is simple: raw white meat pounded, sieved, lightened with cream, and set by gentle moist heat, giving a dish that could be turned out whole, sliced, and sauced. Its appearance here reflects the kind of household this book was written for, one with a mortar, a hair sieve, a steamer and the labour to use them; sieving half a pound of pounded chicken by hand was tedious work, which is precisely why such dishes read as refined. The instruction to test a spoonful in a pattypan first is the same check a chef makes on a quenelle mixture today.