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Chicken Ramequins
1½ cupfuls cooked chicken cubes ½ pint (1 cup) cooked peas 1 gill (1/2 cup) sliced mushrooms 2 ozs. (1/4 cup) butter 2 tablespoonfuls flour Salt and pepper Dust of paprika 1 gill (1/2 cup) chicken stock 1 gill (1/2 cup) cream 1 gill (1/2 cup) liquor from canned mushrooms A few browned bread crumbs Blend the butter and flour together in a fireproof dish, add the chicken stock, cream, mushroom liquor, and seasoning of salt, pepper, and paprika. Stir until they boil for three minutes, then add the chicken, peas, and mushrooms, and when all are thoroughly hot and well mixed, divide into hot buttered ramequins. Sprinkle a few browned bread crumbs over the top and serve at once.
A stovetop creamed chicken finished in individual dishes — no baking at all, despite appearing in a casserole book. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the chicken is cooked.
- The pea measurementThe printed page gives ½ pint (1 cup) cooked peas, as our text now reads. One cup of peas is the right proportion against 1½ cups of chicken.
- A gillHalf a cup here, as the book itself glosses it. British gills ran to five fluid ounces, but this text is consistent in using the American four-ounce gill.
- Mushroom liquorThe drained brine from a can of mushrooms. If you use fresh mushrooms instead, substitute more chicken stock and sauté the slices in a little of the butter first, or the sauce will taste thin and the mushrooms will stay squeaky.
- Boil the sauce the full three minutesThis is the hinge. A roux-thickened sauce with only two tablespoons of flour to 1½ cups of liquid needs that time at a genuine boil to lose its raw-flour taste and set its body. Stir constantly, especially with cream in the pan.
- "A fireproof dish"A flameproof saucepan or small enamelled cast-iron pot — anything you can set directly on a burner. In cookery writing of this period "casserole" and "fireproof dish" generally mean the vessel, not a baked dish of food.
- RamequinsSmall individual heatproof dishes, what we call ramekins. Warm and butter them before filling; the mixture is served as it goes in, so cold china will slacken the sauce.
- Browned crumbsDry crumbs toasted in a pan or oven until golden, not raw fresh crumbs. Since nothing goes under heat afterwards, they must be browned in advance or they will simply sit there pale and damp.
- Yield and seasoningThe quantities come to something over four cups of mixture, enough for roughly six standard 6-oz ramekins as a light lunch or first course. Cooked chicken and canned mushroom brine are both already salty — taste before you salt the sauce.
Ramequins arrived in English cookery writing as a French word for a small baked or moulded cheese preparation, and by the late nineteenth century had slid into meaning simply the little dish itself and whatever was served in it. Books of this sort — the fireproof-dish and casserole manuals that proliferated once thick earthenware and enamelled ironware became cheap enough for ordinary households — leaned heavily on individual portions, partly for looks and partly because they let a cook stretch small quantities of leftover meat into something presentable. That is exactly the job here: the recipe's real subject is the remains of a roast fowl. The canned mushrooms and their liquor are a period marker too, canned goods being by then respectable enough to name in a printed recipe rather than something to conceal.