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Creamed Chicken
1 cup cold cooked chicken 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Salt, paprika 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup rich milk Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, and pour the milk in slowly, stirring constantly. Cook until the raw taste of the flour is gone. Add the parsley and seasoning and the diced chicken and cook five minutes. Serve on toast.
A plain white sauce with chicken folded in — the whole thing hinges on cooking the roux long enough and keeping the sauce loose enough to pour.
- Cook the roux, then watch the sauceEqual tablespoons of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives a thin white sauce by the usual period reckoning. Let the butter and flour bubble together a minute before the milk goes in, and simmer two or three minutes after it thickens so the pastiness is gone.
- "Rich milk"Period shorthand for milk that has not been skimmed, or milk with cream stirred back in. Whole milk works; half milk and half light cream is closer to what was meant.
- Five minutes is for the sauce, not the chickenFive minutes in the sauce -- The recipe has the chicken cook five minutes once it goes in. Since it is already cooked and cold it really only needs to heat through, and longer simmering can make breast meat stringy, so add it near the end and take the pan off once it is hot.
- Season harder than you expectSalt and paprika are the only seasoning listed and a milk sauce swallows salt. Taste after the chicken goes in, since cold cooked meat brings none of its own.
- The toast mattersServe on thick bread toasted dry and firm, not soft sandwich slices, or it collapses under the sauce. Cut the slices in triangles and spoon over just before eating.
- YieldOne cup of chicken in one cup of sauce serves two as a light supper, or four spread thinly over toast points as a first course or luncheon dish.
- Using leftovers safelyCold cooked chicken should be refrigerated and used within three or four days, and the finished dish brought to a full simmer before serving.
Creamed chicken on toast is often said to have been one of the standard uses for the remains of a boiled or roast fowl in American and British households from the late nineteenth century onward, and it is essentially a white sauce carrying whatever cooked meat was to hand. Its appearance in a book called Meatless Cookery is less strange than it looks: for much of this period "meat" often meant butcher's meat, the red flesh of beef, mutton and pork, and books written for wartime meat conservation, or for invalid and light cookery, could admit poultry, fish and eggs. Dishes of this kind seem also to have been prized because they stretched a small quantity of expensive protein across several plates, and because a soft, mildly seasoned dish on toast was thought suitable for children, convalescents and the elderly.