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Chicken Hash
Take one and one-half cups of cold chopped chicken; one cup of cold boiled potatoes; one-half cup of stock or water; two tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of chopped parsley; salt and pepper to taste. Chop the chicken and potatoes separately then mix them lightly together. Melt the butter in a chafing-dish, add the potato and meat, the seasoning and the stock, and cook until heated, browning if desired. For this dish the bath is not used.
If liked, one-fourth cup of chopped green peppers may be added to this recipe.
RÉCHAUFFÉ-This is a delicate dish that may be prepared in the chafing-dish for the Sunday night tea. The remnants of cold veal, lamb, chicken or game may be used, or a combination of veal and chicken, lamb or game, if there is not enough of one kind of meat. Chop the meat not too fine, removing all the gristle, season with salt and pepper and set in a cold place until needed; There should be one pint of meat for these proportions. Open a can of mushrooms, cut each in four pieces and set aside in a cold place. When ready to use, make a cream sauce of one and one-half pints milk and three tablespoons of flour dissolved in some of the milk, adding butter, salt and pepper to taste. Add the meat and the cut mushrooms to this sauce, cover and set over the flame until thoroughly heated. The réchauffé should not boil,
Two chafing-dish recipes for using up cold roast meat, written for a diner-height flame rather than a stove. Both depend on reheating cooked meat gently and briefly.
- The hinge: heat, don't cookThe meat is already cooked, and a chafing dish only reheats it. Take both dishes to steaming and stop; the recipe is explicit that the réchauffé should not boil. A few minutes over a moderate flame is enough.
- "The bath is not used"A chafing dish has two pans: a hot-water bath (bain-marie) that sits between the flame and the food pan. For the hash the recipe tells you not to use it, so the food pan goes straight over the flame and the potato can brown. The réchauffé recipe says only to set the pan over the flame, though the bath is the safer way to hold a milk sauce without scorching.
- No chafing dishA heavy 10-inch skillet over medium heat stands in for the hash. For the réchauffé, a saucepan set inside a wider pan of simmering water reproduces the bath exactly.
- Sauce proportionsThree tablespoons of flour to a pint and a half of milk is a thin sauce by modern standards, closer to a soup than a binding. If you want it to coat the meat, work up to five or six tablespoons and an equal weight of butter, cooking the roux a minute before the milk goes in.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod canned mushrooms were small buttons packed in brine, drained before use. Drain and rinse modern ones, or sauté 6-8 oz of fresh mushrooms in butter until their water has cooked off before they go into the sauce.
- RéchaufféFrench for "reheated" ess, and in Victorian and Edwardian menus a polite name for a made-over dish. The pint of chopped meat called for is roughly 1 lb boneless cooked meat.
- SeasoningCold cooked meat and boiled potato both absorb salt heavily, and the stock adds little. Season the meat while chopping, then taste again once the dish is hot.
- YieldThe hash serves two, three at a stretch. The réchauffé, with a pint of meat and a pint and a half of sauce, serves four as a supper dish over toast or in pastry cases.
The chafing dish had a real vogue in American middle-class homes from the 1890s through the 1910s, and this section reflects it: a spirit lamp and a two-part pan let a hostess cook at the table without servants, in a parlor or a bedroom-sitting room, and the equipment became a standard wedding present. The dishes suited to it were nearly all reheated or barely-cooked ones ess creamed things, welsh rarebit, scrambles, lobster Newburg ess because the flame was weak and the pans shallow. The reference to "the Sunday night tea" is the key to why both recipes exist: it is often said that in many households the cook had Sunday evening off, the midday dinner had been the large meal, and supper was assembled by the family from what the roast had left behind. Calling it a ru00e9chauffu00e9 rather than a hash was a matter of presentation as much as technique.