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Chicken à La Crane
1 cup cold chicken 1 cup cream sauce 1 cup boiled mushrooms Cut the chicken into small cubes; add the mushrooms, quartered; stir all into the cream sauce; heat thoroughly and serve in patty shells or patty cups.
A leftovers dish of the chafing-dish era, written in the shorthand of a book that assumes you already have cream sauce and cooked chicken on hand. Everything depends on the sauce.
- Cream sauceA medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and half chicken stock, cooked until it coats a spoon. Thinner than this and the filling runs out of the shell; much thicker and it turns pasty as it cools.
- "Boiled mushrooms"Most likely button mushrooms simmered in salted water, or the tinned equivalent. Sautéing them in butter until the moisture has cooked off gives more flavour and, more importantly, keeps them from watering down the sauce.
- Cold chickenThe recipe is built on the remains of a roast or boiled fowl. Poached breast works, but a mix of light and dark meat has more character. Cut in cubes of about half an inch so the pieces hold their shape in the sauce.
- Patty shells and patty cupsPatty shells are puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases; frozen ones are the direct modern equivalent. "Patty cups" were small ovenproof china or metal cups used for the same purpose when pastry was not made. Toast points or split baking-powder biscuits serve as well.
- Heating throughWarm gently and stop as soon as it is hot. The chicken is already cooked, and holding it at a simmer dries the meat and thins the sauce as the mushrooms release liquid.
- SeasoningThe original names none. It needs salt, white pepper and, by the taste of the period, a little sherry, a scrape of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon. Fill the shells at the last minute so the pastry stays crisp.
- YieldAbout three cups of filling by the measures given, enough to fill several patty shells and serve three or four as a luncheon dish, depending on the size of the shells.
- Filed under VegetablesThe placement is not a description of the dish, which is a poultry entrée. Loose-leaf cookbooks were sold as pages meant to be rearranged by the owner.
Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book, compiled by Jane Eayre Fryer, belongs to the brief vogue for cookbooks bound in ring binders so a housekeeper could add, remove and reshuffle pages, and slip in her own clippings. Dishes like this one "00 cold cooked meat, a cup of white sauce, something in a pastry case " 0 were a familiar presence on the American luncheon and supper table; the cream sauce carried yesterday's fowl into today's meal without anyone having to call it leftovers. The "à la" name follows the French restaurant convention of honouring a person or place, but the book gives no clue as to who Crane was, and no documented attribution survives. Vol-au-vent shells, once the work of a professional pastry cook, had become something a competent home baker or a good bakery could supply, which is why a recipe of this kind could simply end by telling the cook to serve it in patty shells.