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Chicken Patties
Take some patty-pans and line with puff paste and bake to a light brown. Take any remains of cold roasted chickens and their stuffing, put bones and stuffing into a saucepan with one breakfast cupful of water, and stew slowly. Mince the chicken very fine. When the gravy, made of the stuffing and bones, is reduced to a quarter of a pint, strain and put it on the fire again, add three tablespoonfuls of milk, one ounce of butter rolled in flour, and a little pepper and salt. Let this boil for a few minutes, stir in the minced chicken and let it get very hot but do not let it boil after the chicken is added. Turn the paste out of the tins, arrange on a hot dish, fill them with the minced chicken, taking care that it is stirred thoroughly. Serve very hot.
A leftovers dish dressed up for service: cold roast chicken in a gravy built from the carcass and its stuffing, spooned into blind-baked puff pastry shells. Most of the work is in the small pot, not the pastry.
- The hinge: no boiling once the chicken is inAlready-cooked chicken that simmers in sauce turns stringy and dry within a couple of minutes. Bring the sauce to the boil first, take it off the heat, then fold the minced meat in and warm it through gently.
- Patty-pans and puff pastePatty-pans are shallow tartlet or muffin tins, roughly 2 to 3 inches across. Line them with rolled puff pastry, prick the bases, weight them or invert a second tin over the top, and bake at 400-425F until light brown and dry inside, about 15-18 minutes. Store-bought all-butter puff is a fair substitute; vol-au-vent cases work too.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, holding about 8 to 10 fl oz. One cup of water is close enough for stewing the bones and stuffing.
- A quarter of a pintIn American measure that is half a cup, so you are reducing a cup of liquid by half. British readers of the period would have meant 5 fl oz; either way, reduce until it tastes concentrated rather than watching the clock.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manie, butter kneaded with flour, not a cooked roux: work 1 oz (2 tablespoons) softened butter with about a tablespoon of flour into a paste and whisk it into the simmering liquid in small pieces. It thickens on contact and needs a minute or two of boiling to lose the raw flour taste.
- Salt and the stuffingThe stuffing carries some seasoning into the gravy, so how salty it starts out depends on what was in the bird. Taste after reducing, before you add butter and salt.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives no weight of chicken and no yield; any figure is a guess. The finished sauce is only the reduced quarter pint plus three tablespoons of milk, so too much meat for that quantity will leave the mixture dry.
- Assemble at the last minuteFilled pastry goes soft quickly. Have the shells hot from the oven and the filling hot in the pan, and fill them as they go to the table.
Patties in this sense are not ground meat cakes but small pastry cases with a savoury filling he vol-au-vent, and standard nineteenth-century service for minced chicken, sweetbreads, oysters or lobster. The construction here is thoroughly domestic rather than grand: the point is to get a second meal out of a roast bird by simmering the picked bones and the leftover stuffing into a small quantity of strong gravy, a habit common to English and American household cookery of the period, when a roast fowl was expected to yield dinner, then a made dish, then stock. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection mixes hotel cookery of this kind with plain family receipts, and this one reads like the latter, complete with the British "breakfast cupful."