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Chicken Turn-Over
Chop until very fine some cooked chicken, season highly, add half the quantity of finely minced ham; moisten with its own gravy or cream. Roll out trimmings of puff paste or any good pastry and cut in rather large rounds, moisten the edges slightly. Lay a tablespoon of mixture on one half of each round of the paste, fold the other half over it, press the moistened edges closely together and bake in quick oven, or fry in hot fat.
A turnover made from leftovers: cooked chicken and ham bound with gravy, sealed in pastry scraps. The proportions are given by ratio rather than weight, so scale to whatever chicken you have.
- The hinge is a dry fillingMoisten only until the mixture holds together when pressed — a stiff paste, not a sauce. Anything looser will steam inside, blow the seam open and leak into the pan.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. Puff paste needs that heat to lift; at 350F the layers slump and the fat renders out instead of turning to steam.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives a ratio: two parts chopped cooked chicken to one part minced ham. Two cups chicken with one cup ham is about three cups of filling, which at a tablespoon each as directed fills a great many rounds; for a dozen 4-inch turnovers, scale down to about three-quarters of a cup of filling in total.
- "Season highly"Salt, black pepper, and often a little mace or nutmeg and cayenne; such seasonings turn up commonly in period forcemeats. Ham carries most of the salt, so taste the mixture before adding more.
- Trimmings of puff pasteScraps left from rolling out a previous batch. Gather rather than knead them, stack and press rather than ball up, or the layers shear and the pastry bakes tough. Store-bought all-butter puff works, as does a short crust if you want a sturdier hand pie.
- SealingWater on the edges, pressed with a fork or crimped by hand. An egg wash on top gives colour in the oven; skip it if you are frying.
- FryingAbout 375F fat, two to three minutes a side until deep gold. Fried turnovers need a well-crimped seal more than baked ones do, since a leak means water in hot oil.
- ServingHot, as a first course or a supper dish, with the remaining gravy separately. They reheat well in a hot oven and go soft in a microwave.
Turnovers of this kind belong to the long tradition of using up a roast: the meat is chopped, seasoned hard to compensate for a day's loss of flavour, and enclosed in pastry made from the trimmings of another job entirely. Nothing in the recipe is bought specially. The chicken-and-ham combination was a durable favourite in Anglo-American cookery for savoury patties, croquettes and vol-au-vents through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The instruction to use "trimmings of puff paste" assumes a household with scraps of puff paste on hand.