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Chicken in Ramekins
1½ cups cold chicken 1 cup cream sauce Few gratings of nutmeg Buttered bread crumbs Mix the chicken thoroughly with the cream sauce; add the nutmeg and empty into buttered ramekins. Cover with buttered bread crumbs and bake until brown.
Cold beef, lamb and veal may be served in the same manner.
A leftovers dish of the plainest kind: cooked meat bound in white sauce, crumbed, and browned in individual dishes. Everything depends on the sauce being thick enough to hold and the crumbs being genuinely buttered.
- RamekinsIn this period a ramekin meant a small individual china or earthenware baking dish of roughly 4 to 6 oz. The quantities here fill four small ramekins or two larger ones.
- Cream sauceA cream sauce of this period is a basic white sauce, typically about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked until it coats the spoon. Make it on the thick side; a thin sauce will separate and flood the crumbs.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; period recipes rarely gave them. Since you are only heating an already-cooked mixture and browning the top, a hot oven, 400–425F, for 15 to 20 minutes should colour the crumbs without drying the meat.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh soft crumbs in melted butter until each is coated — roughly 1 tablespoon butter to ½ cup crumbs. Dry crumbs scattered on top will scorch before the filling is hot.
- Cut the chicken smallDice or shred the meat to about ½ inch. Large pieces of cold roast chicken sit in the sauce rather than binding with it, and the portions will not hold together on the spoon.
- NutmegFreshly grated is what "few gratings" means; pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and needs a scant ⅛ teaspoon. Salt and pepper are assumed in the sauce and worth checking, since cold cooked chicken tastes underseasoned.
- Chafing dish, oven finishBroiler finish -- Under a broiler for 3 to 4 minutes achieves the same top if the mixture is already hot.
- YieldServes four as a light lunch or supper course, two as a main dish with bread and a salad.
Individual portions baked in small dishes and browned with crumbs were often said to be a common American answer to yesterday's roast around the turn of the twentieth century, and the technique is essentially the French *au gratin* adapted to leftovers and the middle-class table. The chafing dish had a considerable vogue from the 1890s into the 1920s: a spirit-lamp burner and a shallow pan let a hostess assemble hot dishes at table without a servant, and cookbooks of the period gave the appliance whole chapters. Mrs. Fryer's closing line „ that cold beef, lamb, and veal will do the same — is the real point of the entry, marking it as a method rather than a dish, in the tradition of the domestic-science writers who taught the systematic use of remains.