Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Minced Chicken with Eggs
Minced Chicken with Eggs
Take a cold cooked chicken, remove the skin, separate the flesh from the bones and cut it into small pieces; put the bones and trimmings into a stewpan with a pint and a half of stock, a small onion stuck with two or three cloves, and a small bunch of sweet herbs. Boil the stock for an hour, then strain it into a clean stewpan, skim off all the fat, put in the pieces of chicken and keep them simmering at the edge of the fire. When the bird is tender, mix a tablespoonful of flour with a small quantity of milk and stir it into the stock, letting it simmer, but not allowing it to boil. Add one teaspoonful of chutney to the sauce and more seasoning if required, and turn the whole out onto a dish. Break carefully over the top as many eggs as will just cover the mince, but do not crowd them, and be very careful not to damage the yolks; strew a few sifted breadcrumbs lightly over the top, dust over with salt and pepper, and put them in the oven until the eggs are set, but taking care not to let them get hard. When ready, take the dish out of the oven, and serve garnished with croutons of fried bread.
A leftover-chicken dish built in two stages: a quick fortified stock from the carcass, then eggs baked on top of the mince. The hinge is the eggs, which want a moderate oven and a short stay in it.
- YieldOne roast chicken's worth of picked meat will roughly fill a shallow 9- or 10-inch gratin dish. The recipe leaves the number of eggs open: as many as will just cover the mince without crowding, which for a dish that size is likely four to six. That will serve about four as a light main course.
- The stock stageA pint and a half is three cups. Simmering the bones and trimmings in already-made stock enriches and concentrates it; an hour at a bare simmer is reasonable, and the liquid will reduce noticeably, so expect appreciably less than you started with.
- "Simmering at the edge of the fire"On a coal range, the cooler outer ring of the top. Translate as the lowest burner setting, with barely a bubble breaking. The chicken is already cooked and only needs heating through and softening.
- ThickeningOne tablespoon of flour slaked in a few tablespoons of cold milk will thicken two cups of stock only lightly, to a sauce that coats. Whisk the slurry into the hot liquid off the heat, then return it to a gentle heat. Flour-thickened sauces do need a couple of minutes of simmering to lose their raw taste, though the instruction not to let it boil hard is sound with the chicken already in.
- ChutneyHere this means a sweet Anglo-Indian mango chutney rather than a fresh herb chutney. Chop any large fruit pieces fine so the sauce stays smooth; a teaspoon is a background note, and more is not out of place.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits. Eggs broken onto hot mince set in roughly 10 to 14 minutes, whites just opaque and yolks still soft. Pull the dish while the whites look barely underdone, since the hot mince keeps cooking them at the table.
- Breadcrumbs"Sifted" means fine dry crumbs passed through a sieve, not fresh ones. Strew them very lightly and only over the whites if you want the yolks to stay visible and glossy.
- Soft yolksBaked this way the yolks stay runny. If serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized shell eggs or cook until the yolks are firm.
- CroutonsSmall pieces of bread fried until gold, arranged around the rim just before serving so they stay crisp.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, published his Cook Book in 1896, and much of it is less New York invention than a working record of the Anglo-French repertoire a great hotel kitchen was expected to command. This dish belongs squarely to the British breakfast and supper tradition of the period: cold roast fowl minced into a sauce made from its own bones, eggs shirred on top, fried bread around the edge. The teaspoon of chutney gives it a lightly Anglo-Indian cast, of the kind often said to have reached English cookery through returning colonial households in the nineteenth century, though the route is more generalisation than documented practice.