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Entrees (II)
CHICKEN PILLAU. - One pint milk, two well beaten eggs, half a pint cold minced chicken from which the outer skin has been previously removed, and enough cold boiled rice to make a thick batter; season with salt, pepper and butter, and bake in a deep dish for twenty minutes or until a light brown. A pillau of cold meats can be made by adding a little minced ham and onion to seasoning. - Miss Tyson, Virginia.
DAUBE FROIDE.-One beef shin, chopped in several places to break bones, cook in just enough water to prevent burning, till it falls to pieces; , cook in just enough water to prevent burning, till it falls to pieces; after taking out bones, season with a heaping teaspoon flour rubbed into one of butter, red and black pepper, salt and celery seed; stew long enough to cook flour, then pour into a deep dish, cover with a plate, placing on weights to press it. To be eaten cold as souse. -Mrs. C. M. A. LIVER PUDDING-Clean well two hogs' heads, two livers, two lights, six sweet breads, six kidneys split open and all of the good part off sixmilts; soak in tub of soft water over night; next morning boil until done, adding two slices of fat pork, take up, cool slightly and grind in sausage mill; while grinding add some of the grease taken off kettle. When ground season with black pepper, salt and onions (chopped fine) to taste. If not rich enough, boil more middling or pork and add. If stuffed boil again a few minutes.
MEAT PUFFS. - Roll a sheet of good paste and cut into circular shapes by pressing a saucer upon it and passing a sharp knife around the saucer; lay upon the half of each circle of paste, a tablespoon of any kind of meat, poultry, fish, oysters, etc., minced fine and seasoned to taste; moisten with wine or catsup; fold over the other half, crimp the edges and bake or fry. Serve hot or cold.
STEWED MUSHROOMS. - Pare and rub with a little salt, throw in sauce pan without water, let stew until tender; add a small piece of butter, cream or milk, pepper and salt; let them be rather stiff with gravy, will take three hours to make tender; let them cool slowly on back of stove until ready, when thick serve. To dry mushrooms peel and cut from stalks; dry gently in a moderate oven, put them away in a tight can and keep from dampness.
Five separate dishes share this page, ranging from a quick baked rice-and-chicken pudding to a whole-hog offal project. Read each one for what it assumes: a cook with cold leftovers on hand, a wood stove with a cool back corner, and a butcher who sells everything.
- Chicken pillau is a baked pudding, not a pilafDespite the name, nothing here is cooked in broth with raw rice. It is a custard-bound casserole of cold cooked rice and chicken. Bake at 350F in a buttered deep dish; twenty minutes is optimistic for a pint of milk and two eggs, so allow 30-40 minutes and judge by a set centre. Serves four.
- Half a pint of minced chickenMeasured by volume, not weight: about 1 cup packed, roughly 5-6 oz of picked meat, or the yield of one large breast. "Enough cold boiled rice to make a thick batter" is around 2 cups.
- Daube froide is a jellied shin, and shins have changedA beef shin cross-cut with bone in is the collagen source; the recipe relies on it setting firm enough to slice cold. Ask for whole shin or osso buco cuts, not lean shank meat, or the pressed loaf will not hold. "Souse" here means the sliced cold jellied meat, eaten like head cheese.
- Cool the daube in the refrigeratorPressing a hot meat loaf under a weighted plate on the counter, as the original assumes, holds it for hours in the range where bacteria multiply. Press it under weights in the refrigerator instead, and slice within three or four days.
- Liver pudding is scaled for hog-killing dayTwo heads, two livers, two lights, six sweetbreads, six kidneys and six milts will yield something on the order of forty to fifty pounds of pudding. Lights are lungs, which cannot legally be sold for food in the United States, and milts are spleens; both are hard to source. "Middling" is side pork or unsliced streaky bacon.
- "If stuffed, boil again"The mixture is either packed into crocks and eaten sliced, or forced into casings as a cooked sausage. If you case it, the second boil is a poach at 165-180F, never a rolling boil, or the casings split and the fat renders out.
- Meat puffs: turnovers from any good paste"Good paste" means short pastry or puff; a saucer gives 5-6 inch rounds. Bake at 400-425F for 20-25 minutes, or fry at 360F. The filling must be fully cooked and cooled before it goes in, since the pastry sets long before a raw filling would be safe.
- Three hours is far too long for cultivated mushroomsField mushrooms picked mature and gathered thick were being stewed down to tenderness in their own liquor. Supermarket mushrooms are tender in 15-20 minutes, and three hours will reduce them to grey threads. Cook until they have given up their water and it has reduced to a thick gravy, then add the butter and cream.
- Drying mushroomsA period 'moderate oven' was a good deal hotter than anything you want for drying; in a cooling wood range the residual heat did the work. Use the lowest setting your oven offers, around 150-170F with the door propped. Slice thin, dry until they snap rather than bend, and store airtight; any residual moisture will mould in the can.
- Only ever use mushrooms you can identifyThe instruction to pare and salt assumes gathered mushrooms and a cook who grew up sorting them. Nothing in the method neutralises a toxic species.
These five dishes show how a Southern household cookbook of the 1880s organised itself around thrift rather than around courses. The chicken pillau and the meat puffs are both leftover engines, built to absorb whatever cold meat came off yesterday's roast; the daube froide, a French name for a pressed jellied shin eaten like souse, turns the cheapest bone-heavy cut into something sliceable for supper. The liver pudding belongs to a different rhythm altogether: hog killing, which in the rural South happened after the first hard frost and produced far more perishable offal than one family could eat fresh, hence the scale of two heads and six kidneys at once and the immediate grinding, seasoning and casing. The word pillau is generally traced to the Persian and Turkish pilav, though its route into the Lowcountry and Virginia kitchen is disputed — the rice trade and the enslaved cooks who worked with Carolina Gold are often credited, while English cookbook 'pilau' is another well-attested channel — and the word travelled far more widely in the American South than the original technique did, so that by the time The Dixie Cook Book printed Miss Tyson's version it could mean almost any dish of rice and meat baked together. Stewed mushrooms sit slightly apart, closer to English country cookery, and the drying note at the end is the practical half of the entry: before commercial dried mushrooms, a good autumn find was preserved in a tight can and doled out through the winter.