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Chicken and Rice Curry
Take one tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of flour; three-fourths cup of chopped chicken; one cup of milk; two-thirds teaspoon of curry powder; one-fourth cup of boiled rice. Melt the butter, taking care that it does not brown; add the flour and when smooth stir into it the milk; when it thickens add the curry powder, the chicken meat and the rice, and when thoroughly heated, serve at once.
CHICKEN SOUFFLÉ - To the white meat of a cold fowl add one-fourth as much butter and pound together in a mortar; season with salt, pepper and a trifle of mace, and stir well into the mixture a small teacup of cream or white sauce, setting the dish in a gentle heat while mixing. When nearly cold add first the well-beaten yolks of two eggs and then the whites beaten to a froth. (More eggs will make the soufflé richer and lighter.) Put immediately into paper soufflé cases or a soufflé tin and bake from ten to fifteen minutes, according as the paper or tin is used.
Two short entries filed under sauces: a curried creamed chicken meant to be spooned over toast or rice, and a pounded chicken soufflé that assumes you have yesterday's roast fowl in the larder. Neither gives an oven temperature or a yield, so both need a little filling in.
- The hinge: don't brown the rouxThe instruction to keep the butter pale is the whole texture of the dish. Cook the butter and flour together about a minute over low heat until it smells faintly nutty but stays blond, then add the milk gradually off the boil to keep it lump-free.
- Bloom the curry powderAdding curry powder to an already-thickened sauce, as written, leaves it raw and dusty. Stirring it into the butter and flour for thirty seconds before the milk goes in gives a rounder flavour; period curry powders were often milder and more turmeric-forward than many jars sold today, so taste before adding more than the two-thirds teaspoon.
- YieldThe finished dish comes to roughly two cups in all — about a cup of sauce with the chicken and rice folded through — enough for two over toast, rice or split biscuits. It is a way of using up the three-fourths cup of leftover cooked chicken it calls for, not a dish to buy meat for.
- Reheat properlyCold cooked chicken folded into warm sauce needs to come back to a full steaming heat throughout, not merely warm through. Once it is hot, serve it — held on the stove the rice swells and the sauce turns pasty.
- "A small teacup"Period sources reckon a teacup at anywhere from about four to six fluid ounces, so a "small teacup" is somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup of cream or white sauce. A white sauce of this period is the same butter-flour-milk base as the curry above.
- Mortar and pestlePounding cooked white meat with butter to a paste is exactly what a food processor does in twenty seconds. Pulse rather than run it continuously, or the meat goes gluey.
- Souffle oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350–375F, suits ten to fifteen minutes in small cases. The recipe leaves open which of the paper cases or the tin takes the shorter time, so bake until puffed and just set at the centre.
- Mace"A trifle of mace" means a pinch of ground mace, the lacy outer coat of nutmeg. Ground nutmeg, used sparingly, is the nearest substitute.
- Egg techniqueLet the buttered chicken mixture cool to barely warm before the yolks go in, as directed, or they will scramble. Fold the whites in with a light hand and get the dish into the oven immediately; a soufflé batter that stands loses its lift.
Curry powder had long been a British grocery staple by the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book in 1911, and American household manuals treated it much as they treated paprika or celery salt — a seasoning for a cream sauce rather than the foundation of an Indian dish. That may be why this entry sits in the sauce chapter: it is a béchamel with a spoonful of curry powder and whatever cold fowl the kitchen had left, apparently close kin to the creamed chicken and other made-over dishes of the same sort. Butterick sold dress patterns, and its cook book was aimed at the same readership as its fashion magazines — women running a household without a full staff, for whom a Sunday roast chicken was expected to reappear on Monday and Tuesday in some more genteel form. The soufflé that follows is the fancier version of the same economy, dressing up cold breast meat with eggs and cream and baking it in paper cases so it arrives at the table looking like something made on purpose.