Good Entree
1 pt. white sauce. 1 cup chopped cold chicken. 1/2 cup tomatoes, peeled and cut fine. 1/2 teaspoon grated onion. 1 small can button mushrooms sauted in butter. 1/2 cup pecan meats.
Mix lightly in sauce and serve hot in ramekins. Garnish with water cress and serve with salted wafers.
Rub with soft butter, salt and pepper and broil ten minutes. Serve on oblong pieces of buttered toast. Lemon sauce.
A creamed chicken mixture baked or simply heated in individual ramekins — the kind of light entrée that filled the middle of a 1920s luncheon menu. The instructions are terse even by Mrs. Wilson's standards, and the last three sentences do not belong to it.
- The stray ending"Rub with soft butter, salt and pepper and broil ten minutes. Serve on oblong pieces of buttered toast. Lemon sauce." -- is type that appears to have drifted in from a neighbouring broiled dish. Ignore it; nothing in this dish is broiled.
- White sauce, 1 pintRead this as a medium white sauce, on the usual period proportion of roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 2 cups milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Make it slightly thicker than you think you want, because the tomatoes and mushrooms will loosen it.
- Heat, do not boilOnce the chicken goes in, keep the pan below a simmer; cold cooked chicken boiled in sauce turns stringy and dry, and the pecans go soft. The chicken and mushrooms are already cooked; you are mainly bringing the dish to serving temperature.
- Button mushroomsA "small can" of the period held roughly 4 oz drained. Drain them well and brown them in butter before they meet the sauce, or the canning liquid will thin and grey it. Fresh mushrooms, sliced and sauteed until the moisture has cooked off, work in their place.
- Grated onionHalf a teaspoon means onion pulp grated on the fine side of a box grater, juice included — a sharper, wetter thing than minced onion, and it stays raw. If that reads harsh to you, soften it in the butter with the mushrooms.
- TomatoesPeeled fresh tomatoes, seeded and diced small; add them at the end so they hold shape and do not water the sauce down. In winter, drained canned diced tomato is the honest substitute.
- Pecan meats"Meats" simply means shelled nuts. Toast them briefly and add at the last moment — they lose all their character if they sit in hot sauce.
- If you want it brownedThe recipe says only "serve hot in ramekins," but the dish takes well to a buttered-crumb top browned briefly under the broiler, just to colour.
- YieldNearer 4 to 4 1/2 cups of filling by the quantities listed, enough for several ramekins as a luncheon course. Water cress and salted wafers -- thin unsweetened crackers -- are the intended accompaniments and still work.
Mary A. Wilson's 1920 cook book is built around exactly this sort of thing: a small, rich, composed dish served in its own china, requiring no carving and no host at the head of the table. Creamed chicken in ramekins was a staple of American ladies' luncheons, church suppers and hotel "chicken a la king" menus from roughly the 1890s through the 1930s, and its virtue was that it used up yesterday's roast fowl while looking deliberate. The pecans and canned button mushrooms read as period markers -- canned mushrooms were a genuine convenience of the era. The title, "Good Entree," is utilitarian; in the vocabulary of the day an entree was not the main course but a made dish served between the fish and the roast, or on its own at midday.