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Chicken Patties
2 cups cold chicken 1 cup cream sauce Grated nutmeg Cut the chicken into small cubes; add a little grated nutmeg; stir into the cream sauce; heat thoroughly and serve in patty shells or patty cups.
A two-line leftovers dish that assumes the reader already knows how to make a cream sauce and where to buy patty shells. Both assumptions need filling in.
- The cream sauceA cup of 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. It should be thick enough to hold the chicken together in the shell rather than run out of it.
- Patty shellsThese were bought or baked puff-paste cases — what a French kitchen calls bouchées or small vol-au-vents. Frozen puff pastry shells are the direct modern equivalent; bake them empty and fill at the last moment or the bottoms soften.
- "Patty cups"Small china or metal cups used as an alternative to pastry, essentially individual ramekins. The filling was spooned in and served hot.
- Cold chickenThe recipe presumes the carcass of a boiled or roasted fowl already in the icebox. Meat from a poached breast or a supermarket rotisserie bird both work; cut it in genuine small cubes, not shreds, so the pieces read distinctly against the sauce.
- Reheating"Heat thoroughly" means bringing the mixture to a bare simmer, no more. Already-cooked chicken held at a boil in sauce goes stringy and dry within a few minutes.
- NutmegGrate it fresh from the whole seed. A pinch is the intent — nutmeg in a cream sauce is meant to be unidentifiable, registering only as warmth.
- YieldThree cups of filling serves four as a lunch or light supper course, or eight as small hot canapés. Salt and white pepper are not mentioned but the dish needs both.
Creamed chicken in a pastry case was a standby of American middle-class entertaining from the 1890s through the 1920s, the same impulse that produced chicken a la king and the many "creamed" entries in period cookbooks. It solved two problems at once: it used up a bird already carved, and it looked like a composed course when set on a plate in its own shell. Patty shells could be bought ready-baked from a bakery, which may be why a book like this one calls for them without a word of explanation.