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Creamed Dishes
(Oysters, shrimps, lobsters, sweetbreads, chicken, veal, fish, mushrooms, asparagus tips, peas, etc.) INGREDIENTS. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. 4 tablespoonfuls of flour. 2 saltspoonfuls of salt. 2 cups of cream, or 2 cups of milk and 4 tablespoonfuls of butter.
1 saltspoonful of pepper.
1 pint of fish, meat, etc. 2 tablespoonfuls of mushrooms, chopped or diced.
1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley.
1 teaspoonful of onion juice.
1 tablespoonful of lemon juice.
Method. - Prepare the sauce in the usual manner. If oysters are used, they should have been parboiled previously and drained, and, if large, cut in pieces. Fish should be flaked when hot, and meats cut into dice when cold.
This is a master formula rather than a single dish: a white sauce plus a pint of something already cooked. The book assumes you know the sauce, so the method is compressed to a single line.
- The sauce, spelled outMelt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the 4 tablespoons flour and cook a minute or two without colouring, then add the cream gradually off the heat and return it to a simmer, whisking, until it thickens. Season with the salt and pepper at the end. Four tablespoons of flour to 2 cups of liquid gives a sauce on the firmer side of medium, which is what you want when a pint of drained solids is folded in.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the recipe wants 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Taste after the solids go in; oysters and cured meats will need less.
- Milk instead of creamThe alternative given (2 cups milk plus 4 tablespoons butter) is the period's way of rebuilding cream from whole milk. Use whole milk, not skim, or the sauce tastes thin and pasty.
- Everything goes in cookedNothing in the list is raw when it meets the sauce. Chicken, veal and sweetbreads are poached or roasted first and diced cold; fish is cooked and flaked while hot so it breaks along its layers; peas, asparagus tips and mushrooms are cooked and drained. The sauce only reheats them.
- OystersParboil means dropping them into their own liquor or water just until the edges ruffle, well under two minutes, then draining hard. Held any longer, in the parboil or in the chafing dish, they tighten and go rubbery.
- SweetbreadsThese need soaking in cold water, blanching, trimming of membrane and cooling under a weight before they can be diced. Buying them at all now generally means a special order from a butcher.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or halve one and press the cut face against the grater. A teaspoon is enough to be felt but not tasted as onion.
- Lemon and parsley lastAdd the lemon juice off direct heat and just before serving. Acid dropped into a hot milk sauce that is still cooking can curdle it, and the parsley loses its colour if it sits.
- Yield and serviceA pint of solids in 2 cups of sauce serves four generously, six on toast points or in patty shells. If your chafing dish has a water pan, use it; the direct flame will scorch a flour-thickened sauce.
Creamed dishes of this kind were the backbone of American chafing-dish cookery around 1900, when the chafing dish served as equipment for late suppers, card parties and bachelor entertaining. The appeal was arithmetic: one sauce, learned once, would carry oysters, lobster, leftover roast chicken, or a tin of peas. The construction is the French bechamel filtered through the domestic-science cookery of the period, in which sauces were taught as fixed ratios of butter, flour and liquid to be memorised and then varied. That is why this entry reads as a table with a list of permissible fillings at the top rather than as a recipe for any one thing, and why the method can assume a reader who already knows what "the usual manner" means.