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Escaloped Chicken
Boil large, tender chickens until done; remove the skin and gristle and cnop the meat. Butter a large dish, put a layer of pounded crackers in the bottom of a dish and some bits of butter, and moisten with cream. this put a layer of chicken, seasoned with white pepper, salt, grated lemon peel and nutmeg; add bits of butter and a few chopped oysters; put over this more of the cracker, butter and cream, and then a layer of chicken. Cover the top with the cracker and butter. Bake in a hot oven. On
A layered casserole of poached chicken and buttered cracker crumbs, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what a scallop looked like. The typesetting is rough — "cnop" is chop, and "this put" should read "on this put."
- The hinge: everything is already cookedThe chicken is boiled before it goes in, so the bake is only there to set the cream, melt the butter and brown the top. Twenty-five to thirty minutes is enough; an hour dries the meat into threads.
- "A hot oven"Read that as 425-450F. If the top browns before the interior is bubbling, drop to 375F and cover loosely with foil.
- Pounded crackersUnsalted soda crackers or common crackers crushed coarse, not fine like flour — you want crumbs with some structure. About 2 cups of crumbs and 4 to 6 tablespoons of butter serves a 9x13 dish. Panko is the wrong texture here; it will not absorb the cream the same way.
- Moisten, not soak"Moisten with cream" means dampening the crumb layers, not flooding them. Figure 1 to 1 1/2 cups cream total for a large dish, poured a few spoonfuls at a time. A cup of the chicken poaching broth in place of some of the cream keeps it from going heavy.
- The oystersA few chopped raw oysters per layer, drained of most of their liquor, cook through in the bake and give the dish its savour. Use shucked oysters from a reliable source and keep them cold until assembly.
- Grated lemon peel and nutmegThese are the period signature and easy to overdo. Zest of half a lemon and a few scrapes of whole nutmeg for the whole dish; white pepper rather than black, so the layers stay pale.
- Chickens, pluralThe recipe says "chickens" without giving a number, so scale to the dish rather than the bird: about 4 cups of picked meat fills a 9x13 dish and serves six to eight.
- Save the brothThe recipe never says what becomes of the poaching liquid. Reduce it and use it in place of part of the cream, or the dish will taste of butter and little else.
"Escaloped" is one of several nineteenth-century spellings of scalloped. The usual explanation traces the word to the scallop shell such dishes were said to have been baked and served in, though the spelling may also owe something to French escalope; by the 1800s the term was applied to anything layered with crumbs and a liquid and baked. American cookbooks of the period are thick with scalloped oysters, scalloped potatoes and scalloped fish, all built on the same principle: crumbs, butter, cream, and something savoury between. The oysters here are unlikely to be a luxury flourish; East Coast oysters were abundant and cheap for much of the century, and they function much as anchovy or stock does in a modern kitchen, to deepen a bland protein. Boiling a fowl before baking it probably also reflects the birds available at the time - older, tougher hens that wanted long moist cooking before they were fit to eat, which may be why the recipe troubles to specify "tender" chickens at all.