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Salt (Few grains cayenne Slight)
Few grains cayenne Slight grating nutmeg Cook bread and milk to a paste, add butter, white of egg beaten stiff, and seasonings; then add chicken pounded and forced through purée strainer.
This is a fragment: the page has been split mid-recipe, so the ingredient list and quantities belong to the entry above it. What survives is the method for a chicken forcemeat or quenelle-type mixture of the sort used to garnish clear and cream soups in the Boston Cooking School repertoire.
- What is missingThe text opens partway through a list of seasonings, so there are no measurements for bread, milk, butter, egg or chicken. Treat it as a technique note rather than a workable recipe, and find the full entry it was cut from.
- Panada proportionsThe bread-and-milk paste is a classic panada, cooked down until the mixture leaves the side of the pan in one mass. The fragment gives no proportions, and recipes of the period vary; it is the binder, and too much makes the forcemeat pasty, too little and it will not hold.
- Cook the panada, then cool itThe original gives no instruction here, but general forcemeat practice is to let the paste cool before the beaten white goes in: folded into a hot paste the white sets on contact and the mixture will not stay light.
- "Forced through a puree strainer"The chicken is pounded and pushed through a fine sieve; the fragment does not say which cut or how it was cooked. A food processor does the pounding, but the sieving still matters if you want the smooth texture the original assumes.
- Cayenne and nutmegBoth are meant to be barely detectable. "Few grains" is roughly a pinch, and "slight grating" means the smallest amount you can take off a whole nutmeg.
- Cooking the finished mixtureNo cooking direction survives in the fragment. Forcemeat of this kind is usually shaped into small quenelles or balls and poached in barely simmering stock or salted water until firm, a few minutes; a rolling boil breaks them apart.
Chicken forcemeat balls were among the most genteel of soup garnishes: a way of turning leftover breast meat into something that looked deliberate floating in a cream soup or consomme. The technique is French, by way of the professional kitchens that shaped American cookery instruction in the late nineteenth century, and the panada -- bread cooked to a paste in milk -- is the same binder used in quenelles de volaille. The cook working without a stockpot still needed something to make a plain milk-based soup look composed at table.