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Salt and Pepper (Pound the chicken panada egg)
Pound the chicken, panada, egg, and seasoning all together, pass through a hair-sieve; stir in the sauce and cream very carefully, grease your tins and fill with the mixture. Cut in small neat squares, two ounces of chicken, two ounces of tongue, half a truffle and two mushrooms; mix in two tablespoonfuls of white sauce, put a small piece of this in the middle of each one, cover over and steam for ten minutes. Serve with good sauce round.
This is a chicken mousseline (a pounded forcemeat bound with panada and egg) baked in small moulds around a diced salpicon. The book assumes you already have the forcemeat quantities and the sauce from earlier pages, so the amounts here are incomplete by design.
- Missing quantitiesNo weights are given for the chicken, panada, egg or cream — the recipe leans on a master forcemeat elsewhere in the book. A workable ratio for a mousseline is 1 lb raw boneless chicken breast, about 5 oz panada, 2 whole eggs, and 8-10 fl oz cream, but treat that as a reconstruction rather than the author's intent.
- PanadaA thick binding paste, usually breadcrumbs or flour cooked in milk or stock until it leaves the side of the pan, then cooled. It must be cold before it goes in with the chicken or the mixture will slacken and split when the cream is added.
- Hair sieveA horsehair-mesh drum sieve. A nylon tamis, or a food processor followed by a push through a fine sieve, does the same job. The point is to remove sinew, not merely to purée.
- Keep it coldThis is the hinge. Chicken, bowl and cream should all be refrigerator-cold, and the cream added a little at a time; a warm mousseline curdles and steams out watery and grainy.
- TinsSmall dariole or timbale moulds, buttered and ideally lined with a disc of buttered paper at the base. Fill about two-thirds, seat the salpicon in the centre, then cover with more forcemeat.
- The fillingTwo ounces each of cooked chicken and tongue, half a truffle and two mushrooms, all diced small and bound with white sauce. Pickled or braised ox tongue is still sold by good butchers; a little cured ham stands in reasonably. Half a fresh truffle is a luxury today — a few drops of truffle oil or a scrap of preserved truffle in the sauce gets the perfume without the price.
- SteamingTen minutes suits moulds of two or three tablespoons' capacity, covered and set in a steamer or a bain-marie at a bare simmer. Larger moulds need 15-20 minutes. The mousseline is set when it is firm to the touch and springs back; 165F at the centre is the check.
- The sauce"Good sauce round" is not specified; in this context it most likely means a chicken veloute or a supreme (chicken stock thickened with a white roux and finished with cream). Pour it around the turned-out timbales rather than over them, so the pale surface stays visible.
- YieldThe recipe gives no forcemeat weight, so any yield is guesswork: on the reconstructed pound of chicken forcemeat in [0], with the filling above, you would get roughly eight to ten dariole timbales, enough for four to five as a starter or light entree.
The chicken mousseline belongs to the French repertoire that dominated British and American professional kitchens after Careme and Escoffier, and it turns up constantly in late-Victorian and Edwardian "high class" cookery books written for cooks in large households and for the schools that trained them. Its whole point is labour: raw meat pounded in a mortar, forced through hair sieve, lightened with cream, then hidden in a mould with a salpicon — the classical term for a mixture of small even dice bound in sauce — of chicken, tongue, truffle and mushroom, garnishes that signalled expense on a menu of the period.