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Cream of Chicken Sandwich
Take one cupful of chopped chicken and pound it fine; dissolve a tablespoonful of gelatine in a half-cup of cold water; then add the chicken meat, a dash of salt, a teaspoonful of grated horse-radish; stir until it begins to thicken, then add a little at a time, one-half pint of cream that has been whipped to a stiff froth; set in the ice box until very cold. On thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, spread the mixture; cut in fancy shapes and garnish each with a radish.
A chicken mousse stiff enough to slice, from the era when gelatine and a whipping bowl did the work a food processor does now. Two things in the original need correcting: the gelatine will not dissolve in cold water alone, and the chicken must already be cooked.
- The hinge: melting the gelatineSprinkling gelatine over half a cup of cold water only softens it; it has to be warmed until clear before it will set anything. Bloom it five minutes, then melt it over hot water or in short bursts of gentle heat, and let it cool to barely warm before it meets the cream, or the froth collapses.
- Gelatine quantityA tablespoonful of loose granules is roughly one modern envelope and a bit — about 2 1/2 to 3 teaspoons. If your gelatine is leaf rather than powder, count on four sheets. The result is meant to be sliceable, not quivering.
- The chicken is cooked chickenThe recipe gives no cooking step, so it presumes cooked fowl already on hand. Use about a cup of cooked chicken, chopped fine; pounding in a mortar is what a food processor now does in seconds, though pulse it rather than puree it to paste.
- Half a pint of creamThat is one cup of heavy cream, whipped to stiff peaks; it will roughly double in volume. Add it 'a little at a time,' as directed, folding rather than stirring; dumping it in at once knocks the air out.
- Horse-radishA teaspoonful of freshly grated root is sharper than a teaspoonful from a jar, where vinegar and time have dulled it. Taste after folding and add more if the filling reads flat, since cold and cream both mute heat.
- Chilling time"Until very cold" means until fully set — two hours in a shallow covered dish, and it spreads more cleanly if you let it firm up completely and then work it briefly with a spatula.
- Keep it coldCooked chicken suspended in cream and gelatine is a perishable filling. Assemble the sandwiches shortly before serving and keep them refrigerated under a damp cloth rather than sitting out on a tea table for an afternoon.
- YieldThe finished mixture comes to something over three cups, enough for a good plateful of small trimmed sandwiches, depending how thinly it is spread.
Sandwich manuals proliferated in America in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the sandwich had become the backbone of the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the railway lunch basket — and this one belongs squarely to the fancy end of that trade. The technique is borrowed from the professional kitchen's cold larder: a pounded meat forcemeat lightened with whipped cream and bound with gelatine is a cousin of the moulded mousses Escoffier's generation set in moulds, here demoted to a spread for thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Commercial powdered gelatine, sold in packets from about 1890 onward, is what made such things possible for a home cook who was no longer expected to boil calves' feet; the "fancy shapes" and the radish garnish mark it as party food, meant to be looked at as much as eaten.