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Chicken Pates
Mince chicken that has been previously roasted or boiled, and season well; stir into this a sauce made of half a pint of milk, into which, while boiling, a teaspoonful of corn starch has been added to thicken; season with butter, about a teaspoonful, then salt and pepper to taste. Have ready small pate pans lined with a good puff paste. Bake the crust in a brisk oven; then fill the pans and set in the oven a few minutes to brown very slightly.
A straightforward use for leftover roast or boiled chicken, built on a thin cornstarch-thickened white sauce and baked shells. The only real skill involved is keeping the filling loose enough to spoon and the crust crisp enough to hold it.
- Bake the shells empty firstThis is the hinge: the pastry goes into the oven bare, cools slightly, and is filled only at the end. Line small tins with puff paste, prick or weight the bases, and bake until fully set and coloured, or the wet filling will soften them from underneath.
- "Half a pint of milk"One cup. American pints are 16 fl oz, so half a pint is 8 fl oz; if you are working from a British edition, 10 fl oz.
- "Brisk oven"A hot oven, in the region of 400-425F. That is for the empty shells. The brief final browning after filling needs only a few minutes at the same heat, or a moment under the broiler.
- Corn starch, not flourA teaspoon of cornstarch to a cup of milk gives a sauce barely thicker than cream. Whisk it with a spoonful of cold milk before adding it to the boiling milk, and let it cook a minute so it loses the raw starch taste. Cornstarch sauces thin again if held hot too long, so make it close to serving.
- "Season well" means more than it soundsCooked chicken and a milk sauce are both bland. Salt firmly, use white or black pepper generously, and a scrape of nutmeg or a little of the chicken's own jelly or stock is in keeping with the period.
- Pate pansSmall individual tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 3 inches across; a standard muffin tin works, or use cut rounds of puff pastry scored to make vol-au-vent cases.
- ConsistencyAim for a mince that mounds on a spoon but is not stiff. If it looks pasty, loosen with milk or stock rather than adding more butter.
- Yield and servingThe recipe specifies neither the quantity of chicken nor the number of shells; judge the mince against the cup of sauce, adding only as much as the sauce will coat. Serve hot, as a lunch or supper dish.
"Pate" here is the older English sense of the word, a small pastry case with a filling, closer to the French pâté in its original meaning of something baked in paste than to the smooth potted liver a modern reader expects. Little filled cases of this kind, filled with minced chicken, sweetbreads, oysters or lobster in a white sauce, were a fixture of late nineteenth-century American entertaining, and they offered one way of turning yesterday's roast fowl into something that could be passed on a plate. The use of cornstarch rather than a flour roux is at least suggestive of the period, though the same books use flour thickenings freely: boxed corn starch became widely available in American groceries in the second half of the century and was heavily promoted for exactly this sort of light sauce, blancmange and pudding work. The Home Cook Book, generally said to have been compiled from contributions by Chicago and other North American housewives, is full of such thrift dishes tucked in among the company fare.