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Creamed Chicken
Take one-half pint of cream or milk; one pint of cooked chicken; one-half teaspoon of salt; one-half teaspoon of pepper; one-half tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one tablespoon of chopped parsley; two eggs (yolks). Rub the butter and flour to a cream. Place the milk in a double boiler, and when scalding, add the flour and butter. Stir well, and cook three minutes. Add the parsley and chicken, and cook until the milk is thoroughly hot again. Beat the yolks well, adding to them two tablespoons of milk; and pour them into the chicken. Cook two minutes and serve in a border of potato or rice.
A late-Victorian velouté-style creamed chicken, thickened first with a small roux and finished with egg yolks. The finish is where it succeeds or curdles.
- The hinge: the yolk finishOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must never boil. Temper them with the two tablespoons of milk as directed, then a ladle of the hot sauce, and hold the pan below a simmer for the final two minutes. The double boiler is doing real work here, not just keeping things warm.
- MeasuresA half pint of cream or milk is one cup. A pint of cooked chicken is a volume measure, not a weight: about two cups of diced meat, roughly 10 to 12 oz.
- PepperHalf a teaspoon of pepper in one cup of sauce is aggressive by current taste and will speckle a pale dish. White pepper at a quarter teaspoon suits the color and the period intent; adjust up if you like heat.
- The roux is deliberately lightThe roux is light -- One tablespoon of flour to a cup of liquid gives a thin sauce, and the yolks supply the remaining body. Do not add more flour to compensate before the eggs go in or the result will be pasty.
- Kneaded butter, not a cooked rouxRubbing butter and flour to a cream is beurre manie, whisked into scalding milk rather than cooked first. Three minutes over water is a short cooking time for the flour, though the quantity here is small; whisk hard when it goes in to avoid lumps.
- The borderA border of potato means mashed potato, often enriched in the manner of duchesse potato, piped or spooned in a ring onto a buttered platter and browned in the oven; the recipe gives no temperature or timing. A rice border is simply firm boiled rice pressed into a ring mold and turned out.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As written it serves three as a luncheon dish, or four inside a substantial potato border.
Creamed chicken was one of the standard uses for a boiled fowl in an American household that had already served the bird once, and it belongs to the same family as chicken a la king and the chicken filling for patty shells and vol-au-vents. The Butterick Cook Book came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, and its dishes tend toward the economical and gently French in technique, built around what could be assembled in a double boiler or chafing dish. The bordure - a ring of piped potato or molded rice with the sauced meat spooned into the center - was a genteel way of making a modest quantity of chicken look like a composed course, and it appears in period cookbooks for creamed sweetbreads, oysters and fish as well.