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Chicken Patties, Parisienne
Remove all the meat from the fowl of this morning, and cut into quarter-inch square pieces. Cut in same shape six canned mushrooms and one truffle. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter with two level tablespoons flour; stir a little, then moisten with a half pint white broth; mix well. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix and reduce the sauce ten minutes, frequently stirring with the wooden spoon. Then add the chicken, mushrooms and truffles, with a tablespoon sherry. Mix well and cook for ten minutes more, lightly mixing occasionally. Dilute an egg with a tablespoon cream and add to the rest, continually stirring while heating for one minute. Place six patties on a hot dish, fill them up with the preparation, cover them, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve.
A leftovers dish dressed for company: yesterday's boiled fowl in a thick velouté, spooned into baked pastry shells. The whole thing takes twenty-five minutes once the chicken is picked.
- What "patties" means hereNot ground meat cakes but patty shells — small puff pastry cases with lids, the vol-au-vent's little cousin. Frozen puff pastry shells work; bake them, hollow out any soft interior, and keep them warm so they do not go leathery when filled.
- UnitsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the nutmeg is an eighth of a teaspoon and the cayenne a quarter — assertive but not fierce. A half pint of broth is one cup.
- White brothA pale, unroasted stock, chicken or veal, ideally the liquid the fowl was poached in. Low-sodium chicken stock stands in; if you use a salted commercial stock, hold back on the half teaspoon of salt until the sauce has reduced.
- The egg liaison is the hingeOnce the beaten egg and cream go in, the sauce must not simmer or it will scramble into grains. Pull the pan off direct heat, temper the egg with a few spoons of hot sauce first, then return it and stir over low heat only until it thickens — the "one minute" is a maximum, not a target.
- TruffleOne canned truffle was a modest garnish when this was written and is a luxury now. A teaspoon of truffle paste or a few drops of truffle oil stirred in at the end gives the intended perfume; leaving it out entirely costs you aroma, not structure.
- Reducing the sauceTen minutes of gentle reduction on one cup of liquid with two tablespoons of flour gives something very thick — closer to a binding paste than a pouring sauce, which is what keeps it inside the pastry. If it stiffens past spoonable, loosen with a little more broth.
- Chicken quantityThe recipe simply says all the meat from yesterday's fowl; for six shells that is roughly two cups of diced cooked chicken. Cut it small, a quarter inch as directed, or the shells will not fill evenly.
- YieldSix filled shells: two apiece as a lunch or first course for three, one apiece for six at a larger meal.
Patty shells filled with creamed poultry were a workhorse of late nineteenth and early twentieth century service — one common way a hotel or a careful household turned the remains of a boiled fowl into something that could be sent to table under a name. "Parisienne" in this period generally signals a French treatment rather than any particular city dish: a white sauce enriched with egg and cream, mushrooms, truffle, a spoon of sherry. A velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison is close to what French kitchens call an allemande, and the formula appears throughout the international cookbooks of the era because it makes cold cooked meat taste deliberate. Note the frank instruction to use "the fowl of this morning" — no apology, because in a house that poached a bird for one meal the second use was simply expected.