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Creamed Chicken
Make a medium thick white sauce, add diced chicken to it, season to taste, and stir in one well beaten egg just before serving. Garnish with minced parsley over top.
A skeleton recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew their sauce proportions. The whole dish stands or falls on the white sauce and on how the egg goes in.
- Medium white sauce, by the numbersThe period standard is 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Thin sauce used 1 tablespoon of each per cup, thick sauce 3 to 4; "medium" is the middle rung and is what binds diced meat without gluing it.
- The hinge: the egg must not boilTemper the beaten egg with a few spoonfuls of hot sauce, stir it back in off the heat, and serve at once. Returned to a boil it will scramble into threads and the sauce will break.
- Hold it hot enoughThe sauce should be near simmering when the egg goes in, and the dish served immediately rather than kept warm at the back of the stove. Note that an egg stirred in off the heat cannot be relied on to reach a safe temperature, so use a pasteurized egg, especially if the dish will stand at all or if you are serving anyone frail.
- The chicken is already cookedThis assumes leftover boiled or roasted fowl, cut small; the recipe specifies only "diced." Raw chicken will not cook through in a sauce that is never allowed to boil hard.
- Season it properly"Season to taste" here would most likely mean salt and pepper, with white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of the chicken's broth all being period options. Milk-and-flour sauce is bland and needs more salt than seems reasonable.
- Proportions and yieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a working ratio, roughly two cups of diced chicken to a cup and a half of sauce will serve about four: less sauce and the mixture is dry, much more and the chicken is lost in it.
- How it was servedNo vessel is given. Period practice offers the obvious candidates: toast points, split baking powder biscuits, patty shells, or a ring of rice or noodles. Spoon it over rather than baking it, which is a different dish.
Creamed chicken belongs to the era when the white sauce was a foundation of American cooking-school teaching, and thin, medium and thick versions were memorized as a ladder of proportions that could carry fish, eggs, vegetables or poultry. Its usefulness was economic as much as culinary: it turned the remains of a boiled fowl into a course that looked composed enough for company, especially served in a pastry shell or from a chafing dish. Dishes of this kind functioned as the follow-on to a large bird rather than as a roast in their own right. The finishing egg, stirred in off the fire, is an older enrichment borrowed from sauce practice, it adds gloss and body without further flour.