Home › Entrées › Darioles de Volaille
Darioles de Volaille
(Tartelettes of Chicken.) Ingredients.
Six Mushrooms. Half a pound of Quenelle Meat. One gill of White Sauce.
Six ounces of the breast of a cooked Chicken.
Two ounces of lean cooked Ham.
The entry as printed is an ingredient list without a method, which was common in professional manuals where the technique was assumed knowledge. What follows explains the components and the standard handling they imply.
- The method is missingOnly the three ingredients are given. Darioles of this kind were commonly made by buttering small dariole moulds, lining them with quenelle forcemeat, filling the centre with the chicken and ham cut in fine dice and bound with a little thick sauce, capping with more forcemeat and poaching gently in a bain-marie; the printed gloss 'Tartelettes' may equally point to a pastry case. Treat the printed text as a component list rather than a working recipe.
- A dariole mouldA small straight-sided tapering metal mould, roughly 2 to 2.5 inches tall and holding about 3 fl oz. Timbale moulds, popover tins or individual metal pudding moulds stand in; the point is a shape that turns out cleanly.
- Quenelle meatThis is forcemeat, not a finished quenelle: raw chicken or veal pounded with panada and egg white, enriched with cream, and pushed through a sieve. A food processor does the pounding, but the mixture still needs sieving for a true texture, and it must stay cold throughout or the emulsion will split.
- Cooked chicken and hamSix ounces of cooked breast is roughly one large poached breast. The ham should be a firm cooked ham cut in small even dice, not a wet supermarket slice, which will bleed water into the forcemeat.
- Poaching, not bakingForcemeat of this kind is set in a water bath so it does not curdle. Keep the water below a simmer, whether on the stove or in a moderate oven, and allow roughly 20 to 25 minutes for moulds of this size, judging by feel. Fierce heat makes the forcemeat grainy and squeezes out its cream.
- Testing and turning outThe centre should feel just firm and a skewer come out clean. Rest the moulds a minute or two before unmoulding so the sides pull away.
- YieldHalf a pound of forcemeat with half a pound of filling gives about a pound in all, or roughly eight small darioles, an entree portion of one or two each.
- ServingEntrées of this type were sent to table masked with a sauce such as suprême or a light velouté, or set on a bed of the same sauce. Without one they eat dry.
A dariole was originally a small filled pastry case, and the word came to mean the tapering mould itself; by the late nineteenth century English kitchens used it for anything set or poached in that shape, sweet or savoury. Chicken darioles belong to the long Victorian and Edwardian fashion for quenelle forcemeat with cream — which let a kitchen turn cooked breast meat and trimmings of ham into something delicate enough for the entrée course of a formal dinner. The English parenthesis "Tartelettes of Chicken" may have been intended as a gloss for readers who knew tartlets better than darioles, though that is only an inference. The compressed, method-free listing might likewise reflect a manual aimed at cooks who needed only the proportions, but it may equally be an artefact of how the entry has been reproduced.