Home › Entrées › Entrées: Reine
Entrées: Reine
Small puff paste patties filled with minced chicken and white sauce, with tongue, mushrooms or truffles, are served as Petites bouchées, or Petits pâtés, à la Reine.
This preparation of chicken is also dressed in little china or paper cases as Petites caisses à la ENTRÉES.
Reine; or with poached eggs on the top, à la Victoria.
Petites caisses à la Belle Isle are filled with chicken or game in white sauce with chopped mushrooms and ham, garnished with shreds of truffle and almonds.
Bordure de riz à la Reine is a round wall of rice filled with minced, or purée of, fowl. It is sometimes garnished with plovers' eggs round the edge.
Minced chicken, with ham or tongue, can be made into croquettes, breadcrumbed and fried, or into rissoles, folded in thin paste and fried. The latter are sometimes coated with broken vermicelli:
One mixture runs through this entire page: minced chicken in white sauce. What changes is the container, and the container is what gets the name.
- À la Reine is the fillingWherever the book uses it, à la Reine means minced chicken bound with white sauce, usually with tongue, mushrooms or truffle in it. The name travels with the mixture, so a card could offer three Reine dishes in one meal without repeating a word.
- Six vessels, one fillingPuff paste patties, little china cases, paper cases, a wall of rice, croquettes and rissoles. The page is a list of ways to hold a sauced mince, and it is worth reading as a prompt: the mixture is easy, and the choice of container decides whether it reads as a canapé, a starter or a supper.
- Bordure de riz is a rice wallA ring of cooked rice moulded on the dish with the mince poured into the middle. It has disappeared completely, and it solves a real problem at a buffet, since it holds a soft filling in place and can be made an hour ahead.
- Plovers’ eggs are not an optionThe rice border is garnished with them, and they are not something a cook can buy. Plovers are protected birds; where this garnish survives at all it survives as quail eggs, which are the right size and the wrong colour.
- Vermicelli as a coatingThe rissoles are sometimes rolled in broken vermicelli instead of breadcrumbs, which fries into a spiky shell. The idea has come back in other kitchens under other names, and it works with any fine dried noodle crushed in the bag.
- Bouchées are vol-au-vent casesPetites bouchées and petits pâtés are small puff paste cases, and all-butter puff pastry plus two sizes of cutter will produce them. The page assumes you are making the pastry, which is the only genuinely long part of anything described here.
Behind this page is a boiled fowl, and the question of what to do with it after the first meal. A chicken poached for stock leaves a quantity of cooked white meat that is dry, mild and difficult to serve again as meat, and the answer worked out in kitchens of this period was to mince it, bind it in sauce, and put it inside something. The naming then did the rest of the work: the same mixture is royal in a pastry case, imperial with a poached egg on top, and merely a croquette when fried. The run of names after European and British titles, Reine, Victoria, Belle Isle, tells you who the card was written to flatter, and the care taken over paper cases and shreds of truffle tells you that the appearance of the plate was carrying the dish.