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Creamed Chicken
2 cups cold cooked chicken, cut in dice 2 cups White Sauce II 1/8 teaspoon celery salt Heat chicken dice in sauce, to which celery salt has been added.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have leftover roast or boiled fowl and know the book's white sauce by number. Both assumptions need filling in.
- White Sauce IIFarmer's numbered white sauces run from thinner to thicker, so check the sauce entry in the copy you are reading rather than assuming a ratio. A workable stand-in is a medium sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup of milk whisked in, seasoned with salt and white pepper, for each cup of sauce. It should coat a spoon without setting into paste.
- How much chicken that isTwo cups of diced cooked meat is roughly 10 to 12 ounces, about what you get from the breast and thighs of a small 3 lb bird. A supermarket rotisserie chicken yields plenty, though the seasoned skin will change the flavour.
- The hinge: warm, do not boilOnce the diced chicken goes in, keep the pan below a simmer. Already-cooked meat that boils in sauce squeezes out its moisture and turns stringy, and the flour-thickened milk scorches on the bottom the moment it catches. Five minutes over low heat, stirring, is enough.
- Celery saltAn eighth of a teaspoon is not a rounding error here; it is effectively the whole seasoning idea of the dish. Celery salt brands vary in strength and salt content, so season the white sauce lightly and taste after the celery salt is in.
- Cut the dice largeThe recipe says 'cut in dice', so aim for half-inch pieces rather than shreds. Fine shreds disappear into the sauce and the dish reads as gravy.
- ServingThis reads as a filling rather than a plated dish; such mixtures were commonly served on toast points, in patty shells or bread cases, over split baking powder biscuits, or inside a border of rice or mashed potato. If you want to turn it into a gratin with buttered crumbs, a hot oven will brown it, but that is an addition of your own, not part of this recipe.
- YieldFour cups of finished mixture, which serves four generously as a main course or six over toast at lunch. Leftovers thicken considerably when chilled; loosen with milk when reheating.
"Creamed" anything is a hallmark of turn-of-the-century American cooking-school teaching, and this entry shows why: it is less a recipe than an exercise in combination, assuming the student has already mastered the graded white sauces earlier in the book and can now apply one to whatever cold meat the household has. Fannie Farmer's method-first approach treated béchamel as a foundation to be learned in graded versions and then deployed across other dishes, which is often said to be why creamed dishes of this kind could be set down in three lines. The dish belonged to the era of chafing-dish suppers, church luncheons and patty shells, and it survived into the twentieth century largely because it solved the problem of Sunday's roast fowl on Monday. It is generally traced forward to dishes of the same idea with the sauce bought rather than made.