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Chicken Biscuit Finger
Chop cold boiled chicken very fine; add a little chopped parsley; moisten with salad dressing; make rolls of the mixture about the size of a small pickle. Cover each roll with baking powder biscuit dough rolled thin, pressing the ends tightly. Brush with beaten egg and bake.
A hot hand-pie in all but name, and the sort of thing a 1900s cook made with Sunday's leftover fowl. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, so the numbers below are the ones that matter.
- OvenBake at 425F, which is what baking powder biscuit dough wants for lift and colour. Figure 12 to 15 minutes, until the pastry is set and browned; the filling is already cooked, so the dough governs the timing.
- Salad dressingIn this period that usually means a cooked (boiled) dressing thickened with egg and flour, or mayonnaise. Either works. Use a restrained amount, no more than a couple of tablespoons per cup of chicken, or the filling loosens and pushes out at the seams.
- Chill the fillingThe one instruction that decides the outcome. Roll the logs and refrigerate them until firm before wrapping. Warm, soft filling smears into the dough and the rolls burst.
- SizeRead a small pickle as roughly a gherkin: 2 to 3 inches long and about as thick as your thumb. That gives a two-bite finger, which is the point.
- SealingRoll the biscuit dough thin, about 1/8 inch, and press the ends firmly, sealing with a dab of water or egg if the dough has dried. Set them seam side down on the sheet.
- Egg washA whole beaten egg, or a yolk with a teaspoon of water, gives a better gloss than white alone. Brush lightly; pooled egg bakes into rubbery patches.
- Cold boiled chickenPoached or roast chicken both do. Chop by hand rather than in a processor, which turns it to paste and squeezes out the moisture the dressing is meant to supply.
- Yield and servingAbout a pound of chopped chicken makes 16 to 18 fingers. Serve warm, within an hour of baking; the biscuit dough goes leathery once cold.
Sandwich books were a small publishing industry in the United States between about 1890 and 1920, when afternoon tea, card parties and railway luncheon baskets all wanted portable food and cheap printed collections obliged with hundreds of variations on bread and filling. If this recipe belongs to that category, it stretches it: instead of bread it uses baking powder biscuit dough, the American quick bread that is often said to have displaced much yeast baking in the home kitchen after chemical leaveners became reliable and inexpensive in the second half of the nineteenth century. The recipe's real subject is thrift. Cold boiled fowl was a standing feature of the household larder, and chopping it fine, binding it with dressing and hiding it in pastry is the same logic that produced croquettes, timbales and creamed chicken on toast throughout the period. "Finger" here simply denotes shape and portion, as it still does in finger sandwiches and fish fingers.