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Left-Overs (Blanquette of Chicken)
Blanquette of Chicken with Peas Cusk a la Cremê with chopped potatoes; pour over enough milk or stock to moisten; stir until well mixed; then cook slowly until browned underneath. Fold over like an omelet and serve garnished with parsley and poached eggs.
This page is a casualty of the loose-leaf format: two menu headings have run into the text of a third recipe, so what survives is the method for a chicken-and-potato hash with no ingredient list attached. It is workable if you read it as a hash, but you are supplying the proportions yourself.
- What the text actually is"Blanquette of Chicken with Peas" and "Cusk a la Creme" are almost certainly menu or index lines that bled into the recipe below them. The instructions that follow — moisten with milk or stock, brown underneath, fold like an omelet — describe a skillet hash of chopped cooked meat and potato, not a blanquette, which is a white stew finished with cream and egg yolk and is never browned.
- Proportions to work fromA left-overs hash of this type runs roughly equal volumes of chopped cooked chicken and cold boiled potato, with about a quarter cup of milk or stock per two cups of the mixture. Add only enough liquid to bind; a wet hash steams instead of crusting.
- CuskCusk is a North Atlantic relative of the cod, once cheap and common on New England fish counters and now seldom seen; stocks are much reduced and it has been treated as a species of concern. Haddock or pollock stands in for it in any older recipe.
- The hinge: leave it aloneThe crust is the whole point. Press the mixture flat in a heavy pan over medium-low heat and do not stir or disturb it for eight to ten minutes, until the underside is set and browned, then fold. Stirring after the initial mixing means a wet mash with no bottom.
- Fat, which the text omitsNo fat is specified, probably because the pan would ordinarily have held chicken fat, butter or bacon drippings. Two tablespoons of butter or fat in the skillet before the mixture goes in.
- Poached eggsPoach them separately while the hash browns and set them on top at the table; they will not hold if made ahead. Modern practice is a bare simmer, not a boil, for three minutes for a set white and running yolk.
- SeasoningNone is given. Left-over roast chicken and boiled potatoes are both under-seasoned for this purpose; salt, pepper and a little grated onion belong in the mixture before it goes in the pan.
- YieldTwo cups each of chicken and potato fills a 10-inch skillet and serves three to four with an egg apiece.
Loose-leaf cook books were a publishing fashion of the early twentieth century: pages were punched and bound in a ring or post binder so a cook could remove a sheet, prop it up, wipe it off, and add clippings of her own. The format is also why pages like this one come down garbled, with a heading from one leaf sitting above the method from another. The dish belongs to a long tradition of household economy writing in which yesterday's roast fowl, stretched with potato and topped with an egg, was expected to carry a whole meal. Blanquette itself is French, from blanc, white — a stew of veal, lamb or chicken cooked without browning and bound at the end with cream and yolks — and its appearance in an American left-overs chapter shows how thoroughly French kitchen vocabulary had entered domestic-science cookery by this period, often attached to dishes a Paris cook would not have recognised.