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Chicken à la McDonald
Salt. 1 cup cold cooked chicken, cut in strips 3 cold boiled potatoes, cut in one-third inch slices 1 truffle cut in strips 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1½ cups scalded milk
The page as printed gives only the ingredient list; the method that would have followed it is missing. What is left is a standard white-sauce entrée, and the proportions tell you exactly how it was meant to go together.
- The sauce is the whole dishThree tablespoons butter, three of flour and a cup and a half of milk works out to two tablespoons of each per cup: the standard white sauce proportion, not the thick version used for croquettes. Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the roux a minute or two without browning, then add the hot milk gradually and whisk smooth before anything else goes in.
- Reconstructing the assemblySeason the sauce with salt and white pepper, fold in the chicken, potato and truffle, and heat through only until hot. Everything in the list is already cooked, so extended cooking breaks the potato slices down and dries the chicken.
- Scalded milkHeating milk to just below the boil. The usual explanation offered is that it kept unpasteurized milk sweet; in practice warm milk blends into a hot roux faster. Warming it is enough.
- TruffleA whole fresh truffle is out of proportion to a supper dish now. A teaspoon of truffle paste or a few drops of truffle oil stirred into the finished sauce gives the same intent; sautéed cremini mushrooms are the honest substitute if you skip it.
- PotatoesCold boiled waxy potatoes hold their one-third inch slices. Boil them the day before, chill them thoroughly, and slice cold — freshly boiled potatoes crumble into the sauce.
- ServingThe quantities make two or three servings as a light entrée. Dishes of this type were served in a shallow gratin dish, sometimes crumbed with buttered breadcrumbs and browned, or spooned over toast points; the page gives no method, oven heat or timing.
Named entrées like this one — chicken or sweetbreads bound in white sauce and given a proper name — were the backbone of American hotel and club cookery around 1900, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book collected a number of them. The pattern is almost always the same: cold cooked meat, a starch, one luxury garnish, and a béchamel to hold it together, which made it a respectable way to use up yesterday's roast fowl. Who McDonald was is not recorded in the book; such names generally point to a chef, a hostess, or a hotel patron whose preference stuck to the dish. Fannie Farmer's contribution to dishes of this kind was less invention than measurement — her insistence on level cupfuls and exact spoonfuls is why a bare ingredient list like this one is still usable at all.