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Cannelons of Chicken
(Marseilles.) This is a combination of croquette and ravioli, which is a popular dish in Italy. As we go south in France, approaching Spain or Italy, we find borrowed traits of cookery. Chop fine 1 cup of cooked chicken, mix with a spoonful each of flour and butter, 2 spoonfuls of cream, the yolk of an egg, salt, and pepper, and some parsley. Make into a thick paste. Roll out some fine puff paste very thin; cut it into squares of four inches, and filling with the above, fold and pinch the edges. Fry or bake them until a light brown. Drain, serve in a pile, with sauce or parsley.
A cooked-chicken turnover with a bound, croquette-style filling. The recipe assumes you know how to handle puff paste and gives no quantities for seasoning, no oven heat, and no yield.
- "A spoonful"In American books of this period an unqualified spoonful generally means a tablespoon. A tablespoon each of flour and butter with two of cream gives a stiff paste for a cup of chopped chicken, which is about right.
- Cook the binderThe hinge of the dish. Melt the butter, stir in the flour and let it cook a minute before adding the cream, then beat in the yolk off the heat. Raw flour stirred cold into the meat tastes pasty and will not set.
- Chill the fillingThe paste should be cold and firm before it goes onto the pastry. Warm filling softens puff paste and the parcels leak in the fat or split in the oven.
- Puff paste squaresFour-inch squares rolled thin, folded into triangles, edges pressed with a fork or dampened and pinched. A cup of filling makes roughly eight to ten; count on two or three per person as a first course.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 360-375F. Below that the pastry absorbs grease before it puffs; much above it and the outside browns before the layers have risen.
- Baking insteadIf baking, a hot oven, around 425F, for 15-20 minutes, with an egg wash for colour. The recipe's "light brown" may read as underdone by modern expectations for puff paste; a deeper gold ensures the interior layers are cooked through.
- The sauceNone is specified. A thin velouté made from chicken stock, or a light tomato sauce in keeping with the Marseilles attribution, suits better than anything heavy, which fights the pastry.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre that flourished around 1900: the travel cookbook, in which an American writer works through European kitchens and brings the recipes home with a note on where each was eaten. The framing here is doing as much work as the cooking, presenting Marseilles as a place where French technique picks up Italian and Spanish habits on its way down the coast. The dish itself is French in name only in part: cannelon in nineteenth-century French cookery means a rolled or filled pastry case, generally traced to the same root as the secondary, pipe-or-tap sense of cannelle, and Italian cannelloni is usually taken to be a cognate from the shared Latin canna rather than the same word. The comparison to ravioli is the author's own and is loose, since ravioli is made with a boiled egg-pasta rather than fried or baked puff paste. What the recipe really preserves is the older French thrift of the croquette: cooked meat left from another meal, chopped small, bound with a butter-flour-and-cream panada, and turned into something that reads as a new dish.