Home › Meat › Sandwich (Chop the white meat of cold)
Sandwich (Chop the white meat of cold)
Chop the white meat of cold boiled chicken fine, rub to a paste. Put a scant tablespoonful of gelatine in a half-cup of cold water, place it over the fire until it has dissolved; then add the chicken paste, a dash of salt and pepper, and a half-teaspoonful of grated horseradish. Stir this mixture until it begins to thicken, then stir in one cup of cream that has been whipped to a stiff froth, place it in the ice box until very cold; when ready for use, cut thin and place between lightly buttered slices of crustless white bread. Garnish with parsley and an olive.
This is a chicken mousse set with gelatine, chilled firm, then sliced and laid between bread — a sandwich filling treated as a cold entrée. The hinge is temperature control: the gelatine mixture must be cool enough not to deflate the whipped cream, but not so cool that it has already set.
- Gelatine, and what a "scant tablespoonful" meansOne scant tablespoon is roughly one standard envelope of powdered gelatine (about 7 g / 2 1/4 tsp), which is on the firm side for a half-cup of liquid plus a cup of cream — it needs to be sliceable, not spoonable. Soften it in the cold water for five minutes before warming, and warm it only until clear; boiling gelatine weakens its set.
- Cool before folding"Stir this mixture until it begins to thicken" is the whole technique. Let the chicken-gelatine base come down to the consistency of unbeaten egg white before the cream goes in — warmer and the froth collapses, colder and you get rubbery lumps through the mousse.
- Chop, then rub to a pasteA period cook would have done this in a chopping bowl and then worked it smooth with a sieve or mortar. A food processor gets there in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the white meat turns gummy and pasty in texture. The recipe gives no weight: reckon on the white meat of one boiled chicken, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups minced.
- Horseradish"Grated" points to fresh root, though bottled prepared horseradish was also on sale by this date. Bottled versions carry vinegar and brine, which will thin the mixture and read sharper; use half a teaspoon drained, and taste, since jarred strengths vary wildly.
- Setting and slicingThe recipe assumes you pack the mousse into a small loaf pan or mould so it can be turned out and cut thin. Line the pan with plastic wrap, chill at least four hours, and cut with a thin knife dipped in hot water.
- Ice box, then tableThis is a cream-and-poultry mousse with no acid and no cooking after assembly. Keep it refrigerated until the moment of service and do not leave assembled sandwiches out for more than an hour or two.
- YieldRoughly 3 to 4 cups of mousse depending on how much breast meat you start with; enough for a dozen or so small crustless sandwiches cut in halves or fingers.
Sandwich books of the 1900s and 1910s were largely written for a specific social occasion: the afternoon tea, card party and reception, where food had to be easy to handle and look composed on a doily. That is why the crusts come off, the bread is only "lightly buttered" and the plate carries parsley and an olive. The filling itself is a small piece of professional cookery borrowed into the home kitchen — a chicken mousse of the kind French practice built around gelatine and whipped cream, the same family as the chaud-froid and the moulded "chicken cream" that appear in period entrée chapters. Commercial granulated gelatine, on sale from around the 1890s, is what made it a household possibility; before that a cook wanting this texture had to boil down calves' feet or knuckle bones for her own stock jelly. Horseradish here does the work an aspic's vinegar would, cutting the richness of cream against very bland boiled breast meat.