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Torpedoes
3 ozs. (3/4 cup) cold cooked chopped chicken 2 ozs. (1/2 cup) cold cooked chopped ham 1 gill (1/2 cup) rich white sauce 2 chopped hard-cooked eggs 1 teaspoonful chopped pickled walnut 1/2 tablespoonful blanched chopped pistachio nuts Salt and pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful lemon juice 1 gill (1/2 cup) whipping cream Parsley Mix the chicken with the ham, eggs, white sauce, nuts, seasonings, and whipped cream.
Divide the mixture into small ramekins and decorate the top with chopped parsley.
A cold savoury mousse of the old English kind, built on leftover roast chicken and ham and lightened with whipped cream. It comes together in ten minutes once the components are cold.
- The gillThe book equates a gill with half a cup, i.e. 4 fl oz, for both the white sauce and the cream. (An imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so the book is using the American measure.)
- Rich white sauceA béchamel made thicker than pouring consistency — roughly 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp flour to the half cup of milk or cream, cooked out for a few minutes. It must be completely cold before it meets the whipped cream, or the cream will slacken and the mixture will weep.
- Fold, do not mixThe instruction says "mix," but the whipped cream is the only thing giving this body. Combine chicken, ham, eggs, sauce, nuts and seasoning first, then fold the softly whipped cream through at the end.
- Pickled walnutsGreen walnuts pickled in spiced vinegar, sold in jars in Britain and by specialist grocers elsewhere. They are black, soft and sharply malty; nothing substitutes exactly, though a teaspoon of finely chopped capers or cornichon plus a few drops of their brine gives a comparable acid bite.
- PistachiosBlanching means pouring boiling water over shelled nuts, standing a minute, then rubbing off the skins so the green shows. Use unsalted, or cut the added salt back.
- Chop finer than you thinkEverything wants to be a small, even dice — 3–4 mm. Chunks of ham or egg tear through the cream and the whole thing collapses into a salad.
- Chill and serveRefrigerate at least an hour before serving so the sauce sets the mixture. It is a cold dish throughout; keep it cold and eat it the day it is made.
- YieldAbout 3 cups by the recipe's own measures, enough for four to six small ramekins as a first course or as part of a cold buffet. Toast fingers or thin brown bread and butter are the usual accompaniment to dishes of this kind.
The dish belongs to the English tradition of the savoury — a small, sharp, well-seasoned course served cold at luncheon or supper — and its real subject is the Sunday joint: cold chicken and cold ham, chopped fine and made into something a household would not immediately recognise as leftovers. The pickled walnut is the period signature. Pickled in Britain since at least the seventeenth century from green nuts gathered before the shell hardens, it was a standing larder item and the usual way of putting a dark, vinegary edge into cold meat dishes.