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Chicken en Casserole
1 tender chicken for roasting 1/2 cupful Crisco Salt and pepper 1 pint hot water 1 cupful hot sweet cream 2 cupfuls chopped mushrooms 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Clean chicken, split down back, and lay breast upward, in casserole. Spread Crisco over breast, dust with salt and pepper, add hot water, cover closely and cook in hot oven one hour. When nearly tender, put in the cream, mushrooms, and parsley; cover again and cook twenty minutes longer. Serve hot in the casserole. Oysters are sometimes substituted for mushrooms, and will be found to impart a pleasing flavor.
A Crisco-era braise rather than a true roast: the bird cooks covered in a shallow pool of water, then finishes in cream. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- The hinge: cover it tightlyThe whole method depends on a close-fitting lid so the chicken steams rather than roasts. If your dish has a loose lid, seal it with foil under the lid or the pint of water will boil away and the breast will dry out.
- "Casserole" in 1913"Casserole" in this book -- Here it means a lidded earthenware or enamelled cooking vessel that goes from oven to table, not a baked mixture. A 5-quart Dutch oven with a lid does the job, though you lose the serve-at-table effect.
- Hot ovenRead that as 400-425F. At the upper end, check the liquid after 40 minutes and add a splash more water if the pan is nearly dry.
- "Tender chicken for roasting"A young bird of about 3 to 4 lb. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh rather than relying on the stated hour and twenty minutes; a 3 lb split bird will often be done sooner.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinguished from the sour cream and buttermilk also in common use. Use heavy cream, which will not break as readily as light cream during the final 20 minutes.
- The CriscoHalf a cup of shortening on one bird is generous even by the standards of the day, and this book was written to sell Crisco. A quarter cup, or the same amount of butter, is plenty; skim the fat from the pan juices before serving.
- MushroomsTwo cupfuls chopped is roughly 6 oz. They release a good deal of water into the cream sauce, so cook them separately in a dry pan first if you want the sauce to stay thick.
- If you use oysters insteadDo not give them the full twenty minutes. Shucked oysters need two or three minutes in the hot cream, just until the edges ruffle, or they turn rubbery and leach liquor into the sauce.
- YieldFour servings, with the pan cream spooned over. Rice or plain boiled potatoes take the sauce well.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening the company introduced in 1911, which explains why half a cupful of it turns up on a single chicken. The dish itself belongs to a broader Edwardian enthusiasm for en casserole cookery, in which food was cooked and brought to table in the same covered earthenware vessel; American magazines of the 1900s and 1910s promoted it as both economical and modern, since the closed pot needed little attention and lost no juices. The offhand suggestion that oysters may stand in for mushrooms reflects how cheap and ordinary oysters still were on the eastern seaboard at the time, a substitution no cookbook would frame so casually today.