Home › Left-Over Poultry › Mushroom Sauce (When no more slices can be cut)
Mushroom Sauce (When no more slices can be cut)
When no more slices can be cut from a cooked chicken or turkey, take the bits of meat near the bones, chop fine, and to two cups of such meat allow one cup of soft, white bread-crumbs and onehalf cup of hot milk. Mix the crumbs and hot milk together, then add the chopped meat and yolks of two eggs. Season with one teaspoonful of salt and one-quarter teaspoonful of pepper.
Beat the whites slightly-they must not be frothy -and mix them well in. Turn the mixture into a buttered pan or mold, cover with a greased paper, and steam; or set in pan of hot water and cook in moderate oven about one hour. Carefully unmold on a hot platter, and serve with or without mushroom sauce (see page 69).
This is a steamed poultry loaf built to use the shreds of meat left clinging to a carcass; the title refers to the sauce, but the instructions are for the mold. The eggs are the whole structure, so treat them carefully.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 325-350F in modern terms. Set the mold in a pan of hot water coming about halfway up its sides, which keeps the egg mixture from curdling into a grainy mass.
- Soft white bread-crumbsThese are fresh crumbs torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a dense, pasty loaf; if you only have dry crumbs, use about half as much.
- Why the whites are not beaten stiffThe instruction that they must not be frothy is the hinge. Air folded into the mixture expands in the oven and then collapses, leaving the loaf pitted and liable to weep. Beat them just until broken up and loose.
- Doneness, not the clockAn hour is a guide for a mold of about a quart. Test with an instant-read thermometer: 165F at the centre, when the loaf feels set and no longer trembles as a liquid. Overcooked, the eggs squeeze out water and the loaf sits in a puddle.
- UnmoldingLet it stand five to ten minutes off the heat before turning out, or it will crack. Run a thin knife around the edge first. A loaf pan lined with buttered parchment is more forgiving than a fancy fluted mold.
- Steaming as the alternativeIf you steam rather than bake, keep the water at a bare simmer and the mold covered with greased paper so condensation does not drip onto the surface. Timing is similar, but check at 45 minutes.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for two cups of meat is reasonable if the bird was roasted unsalted, but leftover seasoned turkey already carries salt. Taste a spoonful of the raw mixture cooked briefly in a skillet before committing the whole batch.
- YieldAbout four servings as a main course with the sauce, or six sliced cold. It slices cleanly the next day, which is arguably its best use.
Books of "left overs" were a small publishing genre in the decades either side of 1900, when a roast bird was a substantial investment and the cook was expected to account for every scrap of it. This preparation belongs to the family of molded and steamed meat mixtures known in French practice as pains and in English-language household books simply as loaves or molds: chopped cooked meat bound with a panade of bread and milk, set with egg, and cooked gently in a water bath. The technique predates this recipe, and it survived into the twentieth century because it turned unpresentable shreds into something that could be unmolded whole and carried to the table on a hot platter with a sauce.