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Creamed Chicken
Stew one chicken until tender; when cold, cut into small dice-shaped pieces. Make a dressing by melting one tablespoonful of butter mixed smooth with one heaping tablespoonful of flour. Add one cupful of cream and the chicken; stir gently until it thickens.
A plain white-sauce chicken filling, meant here to be spread between bread rather than served in a dish. The recipe assumes you already have stewed chicken on hand and gives no seasoning at all, so the work is in the details it leaves out.
- Cook the roux before the cream goes inMelt the butter and stir the flour in over low heat for a minute or two until it smells nutty rather than pasty. Adding cream to raw flour is what gives old-fashioned creamed dishes their chalky taste.
- Quantities and yieldOne tablespoon butter and one heaping tablespoon flour to one cup cream is a fairly thin sauce; if you want a filling stiff enough not to soak bread, use two tablespoons of each. A 3 1/2 to 4 lb stewing chicken will give somewhere around 3 to 4 cups of diced meat.
- "Cupful" and "tablespoonful"Both are close enough to modern measures to use as written. Spoon measurement was not standardised in this period, which is presumably why the flour is specified as "heaping".
- CreamCream of this period was gravity-separated and varied a good deal, but was often nearer today's light cream or half-and-half than to heavy whipping cream. Heavy cream will work but gives a heavier, richer result; light cream or whole milk is likely nearer the original.
- Season itThe recipe names no salt, which is typical of the period and not an instruction to omit it. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg and a little of the chicken's own cooking liquid all belong here.
- Save the stewing brothThin the finished mixture with a few spoonfuls of the strained cooking liquid rather than more cream. It carries far more chicken flavor and keeps the filling from setting hard when it cools.
- Chill before spreadingWarm creamed chicken will go straight through bread. Cool the mixture completely, at which point it firms into a spreadable paste; refrigerate and use within two days.
Creamed chicken belongs to the great age of the white sauce, when a butter-and-flour roux thinned with cream was the standard vehicle for leftover meat, fish, eggs and vegetables in American and British households alike. The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the sandwich shift from a tavern snack towards a fixture of afternoon teas, card parties and church suppers, and cookbooks began collecting soft, mild, pale fillings suited to thin-cut buttered bread. The recipe also assumes a household in which a whole stewed fowl is routine and the remains must be used up, which is why it starts not with the sauce but with what to do about yesterday's chicken.