Home › Left-Over Poultry › Creamed Chicken with Asparagus Tips
Creamed Chicken with Asparagus Tips
Any kind of cooked chicken can be used for this.
1/2 teaspoonful of pepper. 1/2 teaspoonful of mustard. Discard all skin and hard portions. Cut the meat in half-inch pieces. Season with salt, pepper, and one teaspoonful of lemon-juice to one cup of meat.
Add one-half cup of chicken stock-made from bones, wing ends, and the like, and simmer gently together ten minutes, then add one-half cup of canned or cooked asparagus tips to each cup of chicken, and let heat. Make half a cup of white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). When the sauce is cooked, stir in one egg yolk beaten with one teaspoonful of water, and remove from the fire at once. Add this to the hot chicken and serve immediately. Garnish the platter with triangles of well-browned toast.
Minced Chicken and Ham in Tomato Cases 6 tomatoes cup minced chicken cup minced ham cup fresh breadcrumbs 2 teaspoonfuls of salt 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter teaspoonful of pepper teaspoonful of mustard Select uniform tomatoes of medium size. Cut a slice from the stem end and carefully remove the pulp with a spoon. Mix all ingredients well together with the tomato pulp. Season the inside of the tomato cases with salt and a very little sugar, and fill them with the mixture. Put a piece of butter on top of each. Bake in an agate pan in a hot oven about fifteen minutes. The cases should be cooked until tender, but not broken.
Chicken Soufflé Season one cup of white sauce No. 3 (see page 68) with parsley, a little thyme, and onion. Add one cup of chopped chicken, or a mixture of veal and chicken, or chicken and a little tender ham. While hot add the beaten yolks of two eggs, or three, if eggs are plentiful. Let it cool, then cut and fold into the mixture the whites of the eggs beaten stiff. Put into a buttered dish, and bake about twenty minutes in a hot oven. Serve at once.
A quick sauté-pan dish built on a yolk-thickened white sauce, meant to use up roast chicken while it is still good. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the stock is at hand.
- The hinge: the yolkOnce the beaten yolk goes into the white sauce, the pan must come off the heat immediately, as written. Held over the flame it curdles into grainy threads rather than thickening smoothly.
- White sauce No. 2In books of this period the numbered sauces generally run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is likely a medium sauce; the actual proportions are given on page 68 of the original, not here. You only need half a cup, so scale whatever that table gives.
- Asparagus tipsCanned tips are already soft and will collapse if stirred hard; fold them in and let them warm through for a minute or two. Fresh tips should be blanched 2–3 minutes and shocked before they go in.
- Reheating cooked poultryLeftover chicken has already been cooked once, so the ten-minute simmer in stock is for flavour and moisture, not doneness. Bring it to a full 165°F/74°C throughout before the sauce goes in.
- Stock from the carcassThe half cup of stock is best made as directed, from bones and wing ends; the recipe gives no time or aromatics. Commercial low-sodium broth works, but taste before salting since the recipe already seasons the meat.
- Lemon juiceOne teaspoon per cup of meat sounds slight and is deliberate — it lifts the richness of a yolk-bound sauce without curdling it. Add it with the seasoning at the start, not after the yolk.
- YieldThe recipe gives no total quantity; it scales by the cup of meat, with half a cup of stock, half a cup of asparagus and half a cup of sauce to each cup of chicken. Increase the sauce and yolk in proportion if you scale up.
- ServingThis does not hold. Have the toast triangles browned and the platter warm before the yolk goes into the sauce.
Books of left-overs were a genre in their own right in the early twentieth century, sitting between household economy and outright thrift literature, and creamed chicken was a staple of them — a way to give a second, respectable appearance to a roast bird whose good slices had already been eaten. Finishing a white sauce with an egg yolk is a domesticated form of the French liaison, and numbered, standardised sauces of the kind cross-referenced here are associated with the American cooking-school books. Canned asparagus tips were widely available by the late nineteenth century, and their appearance here suggests how a preserved vegetable could dress up a plate of scraps.