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Fillets of Chicken
(Chafing-dish Style.) Remove the breast from a plump and tender chicken and separate from the bone and skin.
Réchauffés and Olla-Podrida.
Detach the small fillets, then cut each side into two or three lengthwise slices the size of the small fillets. Keep covered closely until ready to cook. Heat the blazer very hot, butter slightly, and in it lay the fillets and sprinkle with the juice of half a lemon, salt and white pepper; add, also, one-third a cup of chicken stock and a tablespoonful of sherry.
Cover and let cook about ten minutes. In the meantime prepare a sauce in a second chafing-dish, using two tablespoonfuls, each, of butter and flour, a dash of salt and pepper, and one cup of stock, in making which a small piece of ham or bacon was used. Add also a tablespoonful of mushroom or tomato catsup and a tablespoonful of sherry wine.
Mutton Rechauffé. (Creole Style.) Melt three tablespoonfuls of butter in the blazer and sauté in this a tablespoonful, each, of green pepper and onion, chopped fine; add three tablespoonfuls of flour and half a teaspoonful of salt, and stir and cook until frothy; then add, gradually, one cup of brown stock and half a cup of tomato purée (cooked tomato strained). Let boil two or three minutes, then set over hot water and stir in one cup of cold roast mutton cut in strips or cubes, and half a cup of cooked macaroni, blanched and drained. Two or three mushrooms or a tablespoonful of mushroom catsup improves this dish.
Two separate chafing-dish recipes have run together here through the printing: the chicken fillets, a stray line of section headings ("Réchauffés and Olla-Podrida"), and then a Creole mutton réchauffé. Read them as two dishes, and treat the ten-minute cooking time as the thing most in need of revision.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the water bath beneath it is the hot-water pan. Any wide, shallow skillet with a lid does the same work, and "set over hot water" simply means move the pan off direct heat onto the water bath, or drop the heat to its lowest setting.
- Ten minutes is too longBoneless breast slices cut the thickness of a small fillet (the tenderloin) are cooked through in three to five minutes in a covered pan with that third of a cup of stock. Ten minutes gives dry, fibrous meat. Cook until just opaque at the centre, around 165F, and pull them out while the liquid reduces.
- The small filletsEach breast half carries a detachable tenderloin underneath. Removing it and cutting the rest of the breast into strips of matching size is the whole point of the preparation: everything cooks in the same few minutes.
- Catsup, not ketchupMushroom catsup of this period is a thin, dark, salty spiced liquid closer to Worcestershire than to the sweet tomato ketchup on a modern shelf. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a little Worcestershire stands in reasonably. Do not substitute modern tomato ketchup, which is far sweeter.
- The ham stockThe sauce calls for stock "in making which a small piece of ham or bacon was used" — this is the seasoning of the sauce, not an optional note. Simmer a scrap of bacon or a ham hock in your chicken stock for twenty minutes, or the sauce will taste flat.
- A second chafing dishFew readers now own two. Make the velouté-style sauce in a small saucepan on the stove — two tablespoons each butter and flour cooked to a pale roux, then a cup of the ham-flavoured stock whisked in — and keep it warm while the fillets cook.
- The mutton dishMutton means mature sheep, stronger and firmer than lamb; cold roast leg of lamb works and is what most butchers can supply. The meat is already cooked and only needs warming through in the sauce, a minute or two, no more. "Blanched" macaroni here means the cooked pasta rinsed in hot water to wash off starch.
- YieldThe chicken fillets from one bird, with sauce, serve two generously or three as part of a larger meal. The mutton réchauffé, with a cup of meat and half a cup of macaroni, serves two.
Both dishes belong to the chafing-dish vogue that swept American middle-class entertaining in the 1890s and early 1900s, when a spirit lamp and a nickel-plated blazer let a hostess cook at the table without servants — supper after the theatre, or a late evening among friends. The section title that has strayed into the middle of this page, "Réchauffés and Olla-Podrida", names the other half of the chafing dish's usefulness: réchauffé is simply French for reheated, the polite word for yesterday's roast, and olla podrida is the Spanish catch-all stew whose name literally means "rotten pot" and which English cookery had long borrowed to mean any dish of mixed odds and ends. Janet McKenzie Hill, who compiled this book and edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, was writing for households that considered wasting a cold joint a moral failing but wanted it back on the table looking deliberate. The mushroom catsup called for in both recipes was the standard savoury bottled seasoning of the period, its surviving recipes an eighteenth-century English development, and it survived on grocers' shelves long after tomato ketchup had taken over the name.