Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Poultry and Game › Creamed Chicken
Creamed Chicken
Boil a chicken and a few sweetbreads and set aside to cool. When cold cut into small pieces. Pour over white sauce, add a small can of mushrooms, and season with salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper and a few drops of tabasco. Reheat and serve.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to poach a fowl, dress a sweetbread and make a white sauce. The quantities are left to judgment, so the notes below fill in what the original takes for granted.
- On the warning aboveSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, not brain or spinal cord, and they are not classed as specified risk material. The advisory attached to this page appears to be a blanket flag on the word rather than a description of what the recipe contains.
- The hinge: never let it boil once the sauce is onReheating creamed chicken over direct heat curdles the sauce and turns the sweetbreads grainy. Warm it in a double boiler or over the lowest flame, stirring, until it steams.
- The chickenThe recipe says only 'boil a chicken'; a boiling fowl would suit the method. A 4-5 lb bird poached at a bare tremble for about an hour and a half, then cooled in its own liquid, should give roughly 4 cups of picked meat and a stock worth keeping for the sauce.
- SweetbreadsSoak 1 lb in several changes of cold water for an hour or two, blanch 3-5 minutes, plunge into ice water, then peel away the membrane and any fat before cutting. Skipping this leaves them chewy and faintly bitter. Order them ahead from a butcher.
- White sauceAround 3 cups: 4 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp flour, 2 cups of the chicken poaching liquid and 1 cup cream or milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Made with milk alone it will taste flat against the poultry.
- A small can of mushroomsPeriod cans of mushrooms were small, and the contents softer and saltier than fresh. About 8 oz of fresh button mushrooms sliced and sauteed in butter until dry does the same job with more flavour; drain any liquid before adding or the sauce thins.
- Cayenne and TabascoBoth are there for warmth rather than heat. A pinch of cayenne and three or four drops of sauce in the whole batch is the intent; the dish should not read as spicy.
- Yield and serviceServes six to eight. The period presentation is in puff-paste patty shells, on toast points, or spooned into a chafing dish for a buffet.
Creamed chicken belongs to the era of the chafing dish and the ladies' luncheon, when a made dish of poultry bound in white sauce could be prepared ahead, carried to the table in one vessel and served without carving. Cookbooks aimed at new housekeepers in this period leaned on this sort of recipe: it stretched a single fowl across a table of guests, forgave an inexperienced hand, and looked grander than it cost. The sweetbreads suggest a genteel household — sweetbreads were then treated as a delicacy rather than a cheap cut, and chicken with sweetbreads turns up on hotel and club menus of the period. The canned mushrooms and the bottled pepper sauce point the other way: the cook here is building even a company dish partly out of the grocer's shelf.