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Rechauffe
3 tablespoons butter
½ teaspoon pepper
3 tablespoons flour
1 can mushrooms
3 cups milk
2 cups ground meat
1 teaspoon salt
Toast
Make a white sauce from fat, flour, milk and seasonings. Add mushrooms, cut in quarters, and the ground meat. Cover and set over low heat until thoroughly heated. Do not boil, as mushrooms are toughened by boiling. Serve on slices of buttered toast, garnished with parsley. This recipe will serve six persons. Remnants of cold veal, lamb, chicken or game may be used, or, if there is not enough of one kind of meat, a combination of veal and chicken, lamb or game.
A leftovers dish built on a thin white sauce, meant to be finished at the table on an electric grill or chafing dish. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions and the meat need attention.
- Do not let it boilThe recipe gives the reason: boiling toughens the mushrooms. Hard boiling can also break a milk sauce holding cooked meat. Keep it at a bare steam.
- "Table grill" means a tabletop cookerLow, steady heat -- If the dish was set under a table-grill or chafing-dish heading, it would have been worked in front of the guests on a small tabletop cooker. On a modern range, use a heavy saucepan over the lowest setting, or a double boiler if your burner will not go low enough.
- The sauce is deliberately thinThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to three cups of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a binding one. If you want it to sit on toast rather than soak through, go to four or five tablespoons of each.
- "Ground meat" means cooked leftoversThis is not raw mince. It is cold roast veal, lamb, chicken or game put through a meat grinder — a coarse chop or a short pulse in a food processor does the same job. Two cups is roughly three-quarters of a pound of cooked meat off the bone.
- Canned mushroomsThe recipe does not say what size can. Canned mushrooms today are sold whole, sliced and as stems and pieces, so quarter them or not depending on what you buy; 8 ounces of fresh mushrooms sautéed in butter first will taste better and is closer to what the dish wants.
- Reheating cooked meatBring the finished mixture to at least 165F throughout and hold it there. "Thoroughly heated" over low heat with cold cooked meat can otherwise sit for a long time in the range where bacteria multiply.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper is for the sauce alone; leftover roast meat is usually already seasoned, so taste at the end rather than at the start.
- YieldSix as written. As a supper dish for four it is more generous.
Réchauffé is simply French for "reheated," and by the turn of the twentieth century it was often used as a polite American name for a made-over dish built from the cold remains of a roast. Butterick, a pattern company whose household books were aimed at women running a house on a careful budget, gives a whole run of these — the point was not thrift disguised but thrift made presentable, which is why the parsley garnish and the French title are both there. The dish belongs to the chafing-dish vogue of the same era, when a small spirit or electric cooker on the table let a hostess assemble a hot dish in front of guests without a servant or a second trip to the kitchen. Canned mushrooms, cheap and shelf-stable, seem to have been a common lift for this kind of pale creamed dish.