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Creamed Chicken
Make a white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). When hot put into it small pieces of chicken, and half as much diced cooked sweetbreads as there is chicken.
Heat through quickly, not allowing the mixture to boil. Just before taking up add one teaspoonful of well-washed parsley, chopped fine. Serve on a hot platter in a border of green peas.
Chicken or Turkey Timbale with or without
A straightforward reheating dish that depends entirely on the sauce and on not overcooking already-cooked meat. Two ingredients need translation for a modern shopper.
- White sauce No. 2The cross-reference is to a sauce recipe not reproduced on this page; in books of this kind the numbered sauces run thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely a medium white sauce -- thin enough to pour, thick enough to cling to the chicken. Any standard butter-flour-milk sauce cooked to that consistency will serve.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Once the chicken is in, hold the pan below a simmer, so that meat which was already cooked once is not squeezed dry and toughened.
- SweetbreadsCalf or lamb thymus and pancreas, sold at butchers and some Asian and halal markets, rarely at supermarkets. They must be soaked, blanched, peeled of membrane and poached before they are the "cooked sweetbreads" this recipe assumes. Omitting them entirely gives a plain creamed chicken; an equal weight of sauteed mushrooms is one substitute in texture if not in flavour.
- ProportionsHalf as much sweetbread as chicken; the recipe does not say whether by weight or by measure, though "diced" suggests measure. For 2 cups diced cooked chicken use 1 cup diced sweetbreads, with enough sauce to coat generously.
- "Well-washed parsley"The insistence on washing is a common flourish in books of this period. Rinse and dry it as you would any herb; the point is that it goes in at the very end so it stays green and does not stew.
- The pea borderPeas are spooned around the rim of a warmed platter as a wall for the creamed mixture. Frozen peas, cooked two or three minutes and drained hard, hold their shape better than long-boiled ones. Warm the platter, as the recipe directs, or the sauce will skin over.
- ServingThe same mixture goes into vol-au-vent shells, over toast points, or into a puff pastry case. Season aggressively at the end — leftover roast chicken and a milk sauce both need more salt and a good grating of nutmeg than you expect.
Creamed chicken with sweetbreads was one of the standard "made dishes" of American and English cookery between about 1880 and 1920, and it turns up constantly in books of this kind because it solved two problems at once: it used up the Sunday bird and it looked expensive. Sweetbreads were then a genuinely fashionable ingredient, served at hotel banquets and written up in society menus, so a household that could stretch a few of them across a dish of yesterday's chicken was borrowing prestige cheaply. The border of green peas is pure late-Victorian plating logic — a pale creamed mixture was thought to need a ring of colour, and peas, asparagus tips or a rice wall did the job. That the book follows it immediately with a chicken or turkey timbale is telling: the same cold cooked meat was expected to reappear in a different mould and under a different name until it was gone.