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Paprika (Bay leaf cup tomato-juice cups)
Bay leaf ½ cup tomato-juice 1½ cups meat, cut in I small cubes Melt butter, stir in flour, salt, paprika, bay leaf and onion; add stock and tomato-juice gradually, stirring constantly. When slightly thickened add mushrooms cut in pieces, meat, and peas. Reheat on stove and serve in croustades. This dish requires good stock. 121 Chicken-and-Rice Soufflé-scallop 1 cup chicken cup boiled rice cup white sauce No.
I (see page 67) 1 egg yolk, beaten
A paprika cream sauce built on stock and tomato juice, folded around cooked poultry with mushrooms and peas and spooned into fried bread cases. The ingredient column has lost most of its quantities, so treat the numbers below as reconstruction rather than transcription.
- What the sauce isButter, flour, seasoning and onion cooked together, then let down with stock and tomato juice: a velouté rather than a milk-based white sauce. The butter, flour and stock quantities are all missing from the fragment, so any ratio is guesswork; the only liquid the text actually gives is the ½ cup of tomato juice.
- "This dish requires good stock"The line is the hinge of the recipe. There is no cream or milk, so the body and flavour come from the stock; use a gelatinous homemade stock. Cubes or thin canned broth leave the sauce tasting of raw flour and tomato.
- PaprikaIn this period paprika generally meant a sweet pepper, Hungarian or Spanish, used as much for colour as heat. The recipe does stir it into the butter and flour, as here; keep the heat low, since paprika scorches quickly and turns bitter. No quantity survives in the fragment.
- Bay leafWhole leaf, stirred in with the flour, and conventionally removed before serving, though the text does not say so. One leaf is plenty for a sauce of this size.
- CroustadesHollowed cases of stale bread, fried in deep fat or butter until crisp, or in modern practice brushed with butter and baked at 375F until golden. Puff-pastry shells or thick toast points serve the same purpose.
- The poultryThe meat -- 1½ cups of cooked meat in small cubes is roughly 8 oz. The recipe specifies only 'meat', not poultry. Because it is already cooked, add it at the end and reheat only until hot through, three or four minutes; longer and it goes stringy.
- Peas and mushroomsThe recipe says only 'peas', which at this date would most likely be cooked or canned, added simply to warm. Note that the method adds mushrooms, meat and peas together, so the mushrooms get no head start in the sauce.
- YieldEnough for four croustades as a light lunch or supper dish, or two as a main course with a salad.
Books of this kind existed to keep Sunday's roast fowl out of the bin, and the croustade was the standard dignifying device: chopped leftovers in a cream sauce became a company dish the moment they arrived in a crisp fried case. The tomato juice here dates the recipe fairly closely, since commercially canned tomato juice became a widely stocked pantry item in American kitchens in the 1920s and 30s and cookbook writers of that generation used it freely to sharpen and colour flour-thickened sauces. Paprika played the same role, giving a pale mixture of chicken and white sauce a warm colour without real heat; it was one of the few spices Anglo-American household cookery of the period used with any enthusiasm, largely thanks to the popularity of Hungarian goulash on restaurant menus.