Home › Invalid Cookery › Creamed Chicken
Creamed Chicken
To cup cold cooked chicken add cup white sauce I. Serve on toast.
Two lines of type, and one of the numbers has dropped out in printing. What survives is a ratio dish: cooked chicken bound in a thin white sauce, meant to be swallowed easily by someone who is ill.
- The missing measurementsThe original reads "To cup cold cooked chicken add cup white sauce I" — both quantities are absent, most likely fractions dropped in setting the type. Equal parts by volume works; roughly 1/2 cup diced chicken to 1/2 cup sauce would give a single invalid's portion, and more sauce makes it looser and easier to eat.
- White Sauce IIn cookbooks of this type the numbered white sauces generally run from thin to thick, so Sauce I is likely the thin one. A thin white sauce is conventionally about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it just coats a spoon. It should pour, not mound.
- Heat it properlyCold cooked chicken that has been in the refrigerator needs to come up to a genuine simmer in the sauce, not merely warm through. Hold it there a minute or two before serving, particularly given the intended eater.
- Cut smallFor a sickroom tray the chicken should be diced fine or shredded, not chunked. The point of the dish is that it takes almost no chewing.
- Season lightlyInvalid cookery of this era was deliberately bland, but a flat white sauce is unpleasant to anyone. Salt it to taste and add white pepper if the patient will tolerate it; a scrape of nutmeg is traditional in a milk sauce.
- The toastUse a firm white bread, toasted dry and hard. Soft toast disintegrates on contact with a thin sauce and turns the plate to paste.
- YieldOn the assumed half-cup measures, one serving. It does not hold well — the sauce skins over and the chicken toughens on standing, so make it at the moment it is wanted.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away to policyholders in enormous numbers through the first half of the twentieth century, part of a wider campaign in which the insurer distributed health pamphlets on the theory that healthier customers lived longer and cost less. That explains the "Invalid Cookery" section: before antibiotics, convalescence from typhoid, pneumonia or influenza could run for weeks, and feeding the patient was a nursing task carried out at home. The rules of the genre were consistent across household manuals — food finely divided, mildly seasoned, white or pale in colour, and served in small portions on a tray. Creamed chicken on toast met every one of them, and the same dish, scaled up and poured into a pastry shell or over waffles, was perfectly respectable company food. The invalid version is simply the smallest, plainest form of it.