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Turkey Chartreuse
To use the remains of a turkey, line the bottom and sides of a buttered mold with boiled rice. Chop fine the turkey meat, add an equal amount of fine, soft bread crumbs, a high seasoning of salt, pepper, onion juice and chopped parsley, then stir in enough stock to just moisten.
Pack this in the center of the mold, cover with the remainder of the rice and steam for an hour, serving it with a cream sauce.
A leftover-turkey mold that depends entirely on the rice being sticky enough to hold a wall. Cook the rice softer than you would for a pilaf.
- The hinge: rice consistencyBoil short- or medium-grain rice until quite soft and slightly starchy, then let it cool just enough to handle. Press it firmly in a layer about half an inch thick against the buttered mold; loose, separate grains will collapse when the mold is turned out.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For a 1.5-quart mold, figure about 1 cup raw rice (roughly 3 cups cooked) for the lining and lid, and 2 cups chopped cooked turkey with 2 cups soft crumbs for the filling.
- Soft bread crumbsThese are fresh crumbs torn or grated from the inside of a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Dried crumbs will drink the stock and make the center pasty.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavor without texture: grate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid, about a teaspoon here. Finely grated onion works as well.
- Moistening"Just moisten" means the filling should hold together when squeezed but release no liquid. Too much stock and the mold weeps into the rice wall.
- SteamingCover the mold tightly with buttered foil or a lid, set it on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer for the hour. Since everything is already cooked, the hour is about setting the shape, not doneness.
- Turning outRest the mold five to ten minutes before inverting; it will release more cleanly and hold its edges.
- Cream sauceA plain white sauce of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk, seasoned, is the usual period reading, though the term was applied loosely. Turkey stock in place of half the milk improves it considerably.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course.
Chartreuse in cookery is not named for the liqueur, though both names are generally traced to the Carthusian monks, whose meatless diet is said to have inspired the vegetable versions. The preparation, in which vegetables or forcemeat are arranged in a lined mold, is associated with eighteenth-century French cookery. By the time the term reached American economy cookbooks it had lost most of its grandeur and meant simply a molded, steamed dish with a decorative casing. Rice appears here in place of the older linings of cabbage leaves or carrot rounds; it was cheap, held its shape, and stretched a small amount of meat a long way. Recipes like this one belong to the large body of American "remains of the turkey" cookery that follows Thanksgiving and Christmas in period books, where the aim was to make a second appearance look deliberate rather than apologetic.