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Chicken with Hard-cooked Eggs
Cut four hard-cooked eggs in slices, add to two cups creamed chicken with two tablespoons sherry.
Béchamel Eggs Two cups Béchamel sauce, mixed with four hard-cooked eggs, cut in slices; one half cup sautéd mushrooms.
Cook all together five minutes; serve on hot toast.
Two chafing-dish preparations run together in one entry: creamed chicken with egg and sherry, and a béchamel-and-mushroom version. Both assume you already have a cooked sauce base and a cooked bird on hand, which is the whole premise of chafing-dish cookery.
- Two recipes, not oneThe first sentence is the chicken dish; everything from "Béchamel Eggs" onward is a separate preparation with no chicken in it. Read them as two, and note that the second gives the cooking time and serving instruction the first omits.
- Creamed chickenCreamed chicken of this period means a standard white sauce (roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or light cream, seasoned) with diced cooked chicken folded in. Two cups of the finished mixture would work out at roughly a cup of meat to a cup of sauce.
- Béchamel hereIn American books of this period béchamel usually means white sauce made with chicken or veal stock in place of some of the milk, not the strict French onion-clouté version. Half stock, half cream gives the intended flavour.
- Hard-cooked eggsBring to a boil, cover, take off the heat for 10-12 minutes, then chill in cold water. Overcooking gives the grey-green sulphur ring, which is conspicuous when the slices sit in a pale sauce.
- The hinge: gentle heatHold the mixture just hot enough to steam rather than boil: sliced egg white toughens with hard cooking, and the eggs are meant to stay in whole slices, so stir as little as possible once they go in. A chafing dish over a spirit lamp will still boil if left over the flame, so draw it off the direct heat.
- The sherryTwo tablespoons stirred in at the end, off the direct flame. Use a dry or medium sherry; cooking sherry is salted and will throw the seasoning off in a sauce this mild.
- MushroomsSauté them separately in butter until the water has driven off and they colour, then add. Raw or undercooked mushrooms will thin the béchamel as they release liquid.
- YieldTwo cups of sauce plus eggs serves three or four on toast as a light supper or luncheon dish. Cut the toast points before you start; the mixture will not wait.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households between about 1890 and the First World War, and many general cookbooks of the era carried a chapter of it. The appeal was social rather than culinary: the dish sat on the table over a spirit lamp, and the host cooked in front of the guests at late suppers, after the theatre, or in bachelor rooms and college quarters where there was no proper stove. That constraint shapes the recipes: everything is cooked already, warmed together for five minutes and served on toast. Lowney's, published by the Massachusetts chocolate firm as a promotional cookbook, took in the whole range of contemporary domestic cooking alongside its confectionery, and this pair of egg dishes — though the printed recipes mention neither a chafing dish nor a spirit lamp — reads like standard chafing-dish repertoire of the period: cooked chicken, a white sauce, hard-cooked eggs, a spoonful of sherry, and no knife work at the table.