No. 2338

Salpicon of Chicken, Baked

Salpicon de Volaille au Gratin

Take one pound of white meat of a cooked chicken, cut it into small dice and put the pieces in a saucepan with four spoonfuls of cooked lean ham, and as much mushrooms, all to be cut alike, and mingle in a few spoonfuls of good reduced bechamel sauce (No. 409), finishing the preparation with a small piece of melted chicken glaze (No. 398). Pour the whole into a small pie dish (Fig. 183), smooth it to a dome and cover with a layer of duchess potato preparation (No. 2785), smooth again, butter over the top and bestrew with bread-crumbs and grated parmesan; bake for a quarter of an hour in a slack oven and serve in the same dish.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A tidy way to use leftover roast or poached chicken: bound diced meat under a piped potato crust. The recipe is written for a professional kitchen with sauces already standing on the stove, so the work is mostly in assembling the components.

What a salpicon isSimply ingredients cut into uniform small dice and bound with a sauce. The recipe asks that the chicken, ham and mushroom all be "cut alike"; the dish depends on that uniformity for texture.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's "spoonful" is generally taken as a tablespoon. On that reading, four tablespoons each of ham and mushroom to a pound of chicken is roughly a quarter cup of each, so the meat stays dominant.
The bechamel must be thick"Good reduced bechamel" means a sauce reduced until it coats heavily, near the consistency of thick custard. A thin sauce will weep under the potato and turn the crust to paste. Use only enough to bind the dice, not to swim them.
Chicken glazeNo. 398 is glace de volaille, chicken stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon of good commercial glace de volaille does the same job; failing that, reduce a cup of strong chicken stock to a scant tablespoon.
Duchess potatoRiced boiled potato enriched with butter and egg yolk, stiff enough to hold a piped shape. It is spread or piped over the filling, not folded in.
Slack oven, and its limitsA slack oven is generally reckoned at around 300F, though the term is imprecise. Fifteen minutes there will heat the dish through but is unlikely to colour the crust, since everything inside is already cooked. Bake hotter, or hold the low oven and finish a minute or two under the broiler for the gratin.
Make the filling coldThe salpicon spreads and domes far more neatly when the sauce has chilled and set. Assemble cold, then bake longer, roughly 25 minutes from the refrigerator.
YieldA pound of chicken plus garnish fills a dish serving four as a lunch course, or six as one entree among several.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and the book is organised as a working professional's reference: nearly every recipe cross-references sauces, garnishes and preparations numbered elsewhere, on the assumption that a brigade already has bechamel and meat glaze at hand. Salpicon comes from the French for a mixture of diced ingredients bound in sauce, and in classical kitchens it was the all-purpose filling for vol-au-vents, croquettes, timbales and rissoles; the word is generally traced to Spanish salpicar, to sprinkle or dice. Au gratin here means only the browned crust, and the pairing of a creamed salpicon with a duchesse potato lid is the same logic that produced the shepherd's pie and the potato-bordered dishes that filled late nineteenth-century restaurant menus, a graceful and thoroughly economical way to send yesterday's roast fowl back to the table under a new name.