Home › Left-Over Poultry › Boneless Birds
Boneless Birds
Cut into small pieces cold roast veal, chicken, or any left-over meat, Season highly. Roll a heaping tablespoonful of the cut meat in a slice of bacon, pinning the bacon together with a slender wooden toothpick. Bake these on a tin in a hot oven about fifteen minutes, basting and turning the "birds." Serve hot on a garnished platter.
A very good luncheon dish. They should be as large as a croquette when served.
Victoria Meat (from Chicken or Veal) 3 teaspoonfuls butter ¼ teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls flour 2 slices onion 4 mushrooms 1 cup stock 1 cup drained peas
A rolled-bacon reheat for cooked poultry or veal, and one of the more useful ideas in the left-over literature. The text runs straight into the ingredient list of the next recipe, "Victoria Meat" — those quantities are not part of the birds.
- The hinge: bacon thicknessThe bacon must be thin enough to crisp and shrink around the filling in the time given. Standard supermarket slices work; thick-cut will still be flabby when the meat inside has dried out.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; in period usage this means roughly 400-450F. Much cooler and the bacon renders slowly while the already-cooked meat inside dries out.
- Fifteen minutes is the outside limitFifteen minutes is approximate, and about as long as you want -- the filling is cooked meat and needs only to be heated through. Judge by the bacon: pull the birds when it is browned and tight, which may be sooner than the stated fifteen minutes.
- "Bake these on a tin"A shallow rimmed baking sheet, not a loaf tin. The rim matters because the rendered bacon fat is the basting liquid; set the birds directly on the metal rather than on a rack.
- ToothpicksSlender wooden picks may char at this heat. Soak them in water first, or use short metal skewers or a wrap of butcher's twine, and count them out before serving.
- "Season highly"The instruction is doing real work — cold cooked meat is bland and the recipe adds no sauce. Salt, pepper, a little mustard or lemon zest, and go further than feels right, remembering the bacon brings its own salt.
- Size and yield"As large as a croquette" means roughly a 2-inch roll, one heaping tablespoon of meat apiece. A cup of chopped left-over chicken gives about eight birds; allow three or four per person at lunch.
- The stray listThe butter, flour, onion, mushrooms, stock and peas at the end belong to Victoria Meat, a separate recipe that follows. Ignore them here.
Wrapping a small parcel of meat in bacon or fat and calling it a "bird" is an old piece of kitchen wordplay; the shape, and the way the parcels are served in a row on a platter, is traditionally linked to roast larks and other small birds, though that derivation is tradition rather than documented fact. The same conceit appears in English-language cookery as "veal birds" or "beef olives." What sets this version apart is that it starts from meat that is already cooked. Left-over cookbooks of the early twentieth century, written for households with an icebox but no freezer, had to solve the problem of yesterday's roast every few days, and one common answer was to hide reheated meat inside something with fat and browning on the outside -- hence the familiar croquette, hash and bacon-wrapped bird. The comparison to a croquette here is telling: it suggests the author expected readers to know exactly what size that is.