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Panada (Pint milk tablespoon butter)
1 cup cold chicken 1 cup water 1 pint milk 1 tablespoon butter Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon cornstarch Chop the chicken very fine and put it over the fire with the water. When boiling, add the cornstarch moistened in a little cold milk; then add the pint of milk; bring to a boil; add the seasoning and butter and serve.
A sickroom preparation rather than a dinner dish: a thin creamed chicken soup thickened with cornstarch. The printed ingredient list is incomplete, so read the method first.
- Missing ingredientsThe list gives milk, butter, cornstarch and seasoning, but the method calls for chopped chicken and water that were never listed. Reckon on about 1 cup of finely chopped cooked chicken and 1 cup of water for the pint of milk; the original leaves both quantities to the cook.
- Chop means chop finePanada was meant to be swallowed with little effort, so the chicken is minced almost to a paste. A few pulses in a food processor, or a chopping knife worked over the meat repeatedly, gets closer to the intent than shredding.
- Slaking the cornstarchThe tablespoon of cornstarch must be stirred into a little cold milk before it meets the hot liquid, exactly as written. Dropped in dry it will seize into lumps that no amount of whisking undoes.
- One boil onlyCornstarch reaches full thickening power at the boil and then begins to thin again with prolonged heat and stirring. Bring it up, let it bubble briefly, and take it off.
- Milk and scorchingA pint of milk over direct heat catches easily once thickened. Use a heavy pan and moderate heat, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water.
- Cooked chicken assumedThe short cooking time suggests already-cooked meat, the sort left from a boiled fowl. If starting from raw, do not rely on the brief simmer to bring the chopped meat through; poach it first and check it is cooked.
- YieldAbout three cups, which is two to three invalid servings or one modest bowl of soup. Season more assertively than the original implies if it is going to the table rather than the sickroom.
Panada is one of the oldest names in European cookery, from the Latin panis, bread: originally bread boiled to a pulp in broth or milk and fed to infants, the sick and the toothless. By the time Mrs. Fryer was writing, the bread had often been replaced by cornstarch or arrowroot and the dish had migrated into the invalid-cookery chapter that many American household manuals of the period carried. Convalescents were expected to be fed by the household rather than a hospital, and books of this era set out graded diets — beef tea, gruel, panada, then solid food — as a matter of routine domestic knowledge.