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Chicken Panade
1 chicken breast 2 tablespoonfuls cream Salt and pepper Cut the chicken into small pieces and shred it finely; put this into an earthenware dish or jar with as much water as will cover it, add a pinch of salt, and cover with paper; stand the jar in a pan of boiling water, allowing the water to come within an inch of the top; cook in this way for two hours; strain the liquid from the chicken, pound it thoroughly and rub it through a sieve, using the liquid to help it through; 1 pint (2 cups) milk I celery stalk 1 egg
The text as printed has come apart: the ingredient list is broken up and scattered through the method, and the instructions stop before the milk, celery and egg are ever used. Treat it as a fragment to be reconstructed rather than followed line by line.
- The missing quantityNo amount of chicken is given. A reasonable working figure is the meat of one small breast, roughly 1/2 lb raw, to the pint of milk; with much less, the finished panade will taste largely of milk.
- What a panade isHere the word means a thin, smooth, spoonable pottage thickened with bread or with sieved meat, rather than the bread-and-milk binding paste that the same word can also denote. The finished dish should pour from a spoon like a thick cream soup.
- Reassembling the methodThe printed instructions end at the sieve. The stranded ingredients suggest the remainder: heat the pint of milk with the celery stalk, strain it, combine it with the sieved chicken, thicken off the heat with the beaten egg and the 2 tablespoons cream, and season. The egg must be added below a simmer or it will curdle into threads.
- The jar in waterThe earthenware jar standing in a pan of boiling water is a bain-marie, and it is the whole point of the technique: the chicken never boils, so it stays pale and the liquid stays clear. A heatproof jar or bowl in a covered pan of gently boiling water does the same thing, topped up as it evaporates.
- Paper coverThe paper is there to keep condensed steam off the meat, not to seal it. Buttered parchment or a plate laid loosely on top is the equivalent.
- Two hours is not too longUnlike a boiled chicken, this is a deliberate extraction at well under boiling point, and the full two hours is needed to draw the juices out. The meat itself will be exhausted and dry, which is why it is pounded and sieved rather than eaten in pieces.
- SievingA mortar and a hair or wire sieve are what the instruction assumes. A food processor will do the pounding, but the mixture still wants pushing through a fine sieve afterwards, or the texture will be gritty in the mouth.
- The egg, and who is eating itSince this was written for invalids, note that the egg is only lightly set by residual heat. For anyone with a compromised immune system, cook the mixture to 160F with a thermometer or use pasteurised egg.
- Yield and seasoningRather more than the pint of milk you start with, so something under three cups, or two invalid servings. Season at the end and taste warm: the celery and the cream both flatten the salt, and invalid dishes of this kind were deliberately mild.
"Invalid Recipes" was a standard chapter in household cookery before hospitals took over the feeding of the sick, and its logic was nutritional rather than culinary: the patient could not chew or digest much, so the cook extracted the substance of meat into a liquid and discarded the fibre. Panade comes from the French pain, bread, and originally meant bread boiled to a pap in broth or milk; the word is often said to have loosened by the late nineteenth century to cover any smooth invalid pottage of this kind, thickened with sieved meat as much as with bread. The recipe sits in a casserole-dish book because the earthenware jar standing in a pan of boiling water is the same vessel and the same slow, moist, indirect heat that the rest of the book is built on, applied here to a sickroom tray instead of a dinner table. Contemporary nursing manuals are traditionally described as pairing dishes like this with beef tea and arrowroot as the first foods offered to a convalescent, part of a graduated diet that appears to have persisted in print for some time afterwards.