No. 938

Patties a la Reine

Bouchees a la Reine

Pound well half a pound of white meat taken from the breast of a cooked chicken, using the same quantity of rice; press through a sieve, and set the puree into a saucepan to heat without boiling, incorporating into it one ounce of fine butter, and season with a little salt; if it should be too thick, add some cream. The chicken puree may be replaced by a small salpicon of white chicken meat cut in eighth of an inch squares, and added to a veloute sauce (No. 415) reduced with cream. Instead of using the puff paste lid, lay on top a round piece of truffle, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and an eighth of an inch in thickness, glazed with a little meat glaze (No.402).

← No. 937 Fresh Mushroom Patties Hot Side Dishes No. 939 Scollop, Oyster, Clam, or Mussel Patties →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you already have puff pastry cases, a velouté and a meat glaze on the shelf; the recipe itself is only the filling. Two details decide whether it works: the heat and the texture.

Never let the purée boilThe chicken-and-rice paste is bound only by butter and its own starch. Brought to a simmer it splits and turns grainy; hold it below 180F, stirring, just until hot through.
The rice measure is ambiguous"The same quantity of rice" almost certainly means half a pound of cooked, well-softened white rice, not raw. Half a pound of raw rice would give a stiff, chalky paste that no amount of cream would rescue.
Pounding and sievingA mortar and a drum sieve were the tools; a food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the result through a fine sieve or tamis. The point of the sieve is to remove chicken fibre, and the machine will not do that for you.
ConsistencyAim for something that holds a soft peak on the spoon and does not run out of the pastry case. Add cream a spoonful at a time, off the heat.
Cross-referencesNo. 415 is velouté, a light stock-based white sauce; No. 402 is meat glaze, stock reduced to a syrup. Reduced veal or chicken demi-glace from a jar stands in for the glaze, and a velouté made with good chicken stock, reduced with cream, for the sauce.
The salpicon alternativeThe second version, diced breast bound in reduced veloute, may suit some cooks better: it tastes of chicken rather than of rice, and it does not need sieving. Cut the dice small enough to spoon neatly into a two-bite shell.
BoucheesBouchees are small puff pastry cases, roughly an inch and a half across, and this is the same filling that goes into larger vol-au-vent. Frozen all-butter puff pastry cut with two ring cutters, or ready-made vol-au-vent cases, are entirely serviceable.
The truffle discA glazed round of black truffle replaces the pastry lid purely for looks. Where truffle is out of reach, a disc of blanched mushroom cap brushed with the glaze reads the same on the plate; truffle oil does not.
YieldHalf a pound of cooked breast meat with rice fills roughly two dozen small bouchees, enough for eight to twelve as a hot side dish or passed appetizer.

A Little History

Bouchee means "mouthful," and a la reine — "in the queen's style" — is one of the older French kitchen tags for a dish of white chicken meat in a pale cream sauce, traditionally traced to Marie Leszczynska, queen to Louis XV, though the attribution is culinary folklore rather than documented fact. By the time Charles Ranhofer set down The Epicurean in 1894, after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, a la reine had hardened into a specification: chicken breast, no browning, nothing to tint the sauce. The rice here is doing work that a modern cook would give to a roux or to reduction — it is a thickener that adds no color and no competing flavor, in the same family as the almond- and bread-thickened white dishes of medieval European cookery. Ranhofer's habit of numbering everything and cross-referencing his own sauces tells you who the book was for: a professional brigade with a stockpot already going, not a household cook starting from nothing.