Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Chicken with Mushrooms
Chicken with Mushrooms
Melt one-fourth a cup of butter in the blazer; add six mushroom caps, peeled and sliced, and cook slowly, with a teaspoonful of grated onion, about six minutes; add two tablespoonfuls of flour, stir until smooth, then add one cup of cream, stock or milk, pepper and salt, and a few grains of mace.
When the sauce boils, stir in one pint of chicken, finely chopped, and serve as soon as hot. Sweetbreads, lamb or veal may be served in the same manner.
A chafing-dish cream sauce built on cooked chicken, meant to be assembled at the table in a few minutes. It works just as well in a skillet, provided you respect the one rule below.
- The hinge: the chicken is already cookedThis is a dish for leftover roast or poached chicken, added only to finish heating through. Hold it in the sauce longer than a minute or two and the fibres tighten and go stringy.
- "The blazer"The blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Any 8- to 10-inch skillet or saucepan does the same job; use moderate heat throughout, as a chafing-dish flame is gentle.
- One pint of chickenMeasured by volume after chopping, so about 2 cups, or roughly 10 to 12 ounces of cooked meat. Chop fine but not to a paste; the sauce should carry distinct pieces.
- Peeled mushroom capsPeriod cookbooks routinely direct peeling mushroom caps, whether from convention or to shed grit; modern buttons and creminis need only wiping. Six caps is roughly 4 ounces, and the stems are worth slicing in as well.
- Grated onionA teaspoon of onion grated on a box grater, juice and all, so it dissolves into the butter rather than staying in visible pieces. A finely minced shallot is a reasonable substitute.
- Cream, stock or milkAll three work, but they behave differently: cream gives the thickest result, milk the thinnest, stock the most savoury. With stock alone, finish with a spoonful of cream if you want the classic pale sauce.
- MaceA few grains means a scant pinch of ground mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. Ground nutmeg in a smaller quantity stands in.
- The variationsSweetbreads, lamb and veal are all assumed to be already cooked. Sweetbreads in particular must be soaked, blanched, trimmed and poached before they come anywhere near this sauce; raw ones will not cook through in the time given.
- YieldServes two generously or four as a light course, over toast points, in patty shells, or on rice.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American cities around 1900, and books like this one were written for it: a spirit lamp, a blazer, and a repertoire of dishes that could be made in front of guests without a kitchen. Many such dishes, this one included, are built on something already cooked — chopped chicken, poached sweetbreads, hard-boiled eggs — bound in a quick cream sauce, because the equipment could do little more than warm and thicken. The dish is close in spirit to a chicken a la king, and its restrained seasoning of grated onion and a few grains of mace is typical of American cookery-school sauces of the period. Chafing-dish dishes were often associated with late suppers and after-theatre entertaining, which assumed a household with cold cooked meat on hand.