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Chicken Klopps with Bechamel Sauce
INGREDIENTS. 2 cups of cold chicken, 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley. ¼ a teaspoonful of celery pepper.
The unbeaten whites of 4 eggs.
1 teaspoonful of salt.
Method. - When ready to cook, mix the ingredients together thoroughly and form into round balls. Place the balls carefully in water just off the boil, and, in about five minutes, or as soon as the egg seems poached, remove the klopps with a skimmer. Serve with 1 a cup of butter. 1/3 a cup of flour.
1 cup of cream.
A poached chicken quenelle in all but name, thickened only by raw egg white. The whole thing hinges on the water temperature: at a rolling boil the balls break apart and the white turns to rags.
- Chop the chicken fine"2 cups of cold chicken" means cooked meat from a boiled or roast bird, minced or ground fine enough to hold together. Coarse dice will not bind, and the balls will fall apart in the water. A few pulses in a food processor gives the right texture; a paste is too far.
- "Water just off the boil"That is the instruction that matters. Keep the pan below a simmer, with the surface barely shivering, and the balls small enough that five minutes sets the white through; a boil will shred them.
- Celery pepperA period seasoning blend of ground white or black pepper with ground celery seed. Substitute a quarter teaspoon of pepper with a pinch of ground celery seed, or use celery salt and cut the added salt accordingly.
- Egg whites, unbeatenFour whites to two cups of meat is a generous amount of binder, and they must go in unwhipped so the mixture stays dense enough to sink and hold its shape. Chill the mixture for twenty minutes before shaping; it handles far better cold.
- The sauce ingredientsThe butter, flour and cream listed at the end are the Bechamel of the title, not a garnish. The butter figure has lost its fraction in this printing; a workable Bechamel from 1/3 cup flour takes about 1/3 cup butter and rather more than one cup of liquid, so thin it with some of the poaching water or chicken stock to a coating consistency.
- Working in a chafing dishWorking in batches -- Poach in batches of five or six so the water temperature does not drop, and keep the finished klopps warm in the sauce rather than in the water.
- YieldTwo cups of chicken should make roughly twelve to sixteen balls, enough for four as a light supper or six as a small course.
Klops is German for a meatball, best known through Königsberger Klopse, the veal-and-anchovy meatballs served in a white caper sauce; the Anglicised spelling "klopps" appears in American cookery writing around 1900. A chicken version bound with raw egg white and sauced with Béchamel is close to a quenelle under a German name, and it belongs to the period's fondness for using up cold roast fowl in a form genteel enough for company. Chafing-dish cookery was fashionable in the 1890s and 1900s, and a blazer set over hot water cannot easily be brought to a boil, though this recipe itself says nothing about one.