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Blanquette of Chicken
2 cups cold chicken 1 cup cream sauce 1 tablespoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons chopped parsley Few gratings of nutmeg Pinch of clove Heat the chicken in the cream sauce; add seasonings and serve.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how to make a cream sauce. The whole thing hinges on that sauce and on when the lemon juice goes in.
- Cream sauce, definedBooks of this vintage generally mean a white sauce of roughly equal butter and flour cooked together, with about a cup of milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon; two tablespoons of each to the cup gives a medium sauce that will cling to the chicken. Season it with salt and white pepper before the chicken goes in, since nothing later in the recipe adds salt.
- Add the lemon lastAcid stirred into hot dairy will curdle it if the sauce is thin or boiling. Take the pan off direct heat, let it stop bubbling, then stir in the tablespoon of lemon juice along with the parsley.
- Cold chicken means cooked chickenRoast or poached chicken from the day before, cut in bite-sized pieces or short strips. Two cups is roughly 10 oz, about the meat off one small roasted bird or two large breasts.
- Heat gently, and fullyWarm the chicken through in the sauce over low heat for a few minutes only, to 165F; hard boiling shreds the meat and thins the sauce. Reheated cooked poultry should go to that temperature all the way through rather than merely being warmed.
- The spicing is lighter than it reads"Pinch of clove" means ground clove, and a genuine pinch: clove overwhelms cream sauce faster than almost anything else. Grate the nutmeg fresh over the pan.
- Yield and servingThree to four servings. The recipe gives no serving instruction; dishes of this kind were commonly sent to table over toast points, in patty shells or a rice border, or spooned onto boiled noodles.
- Not a blanquette in the French senseA true blanquette is raw meat gently poached and its cooking liquid turned into the sauce, usually finished with egg yolk and cream. This borrows the name and the pale colour only, so do not expect the same depth.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white: a stew in which the meat is never browned and the sauce stays pale, classically made with veal. By the early twentieth century some American household writers had loosened the word to cover almost any cooked white meat reheated in a white sauce, which is close to what happens here. Cream sauce was the workhorse of that whole category, and a cook who could make it reliably could turn the end of a roast chicken into a course that looked deliberate.