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Chicken Hot Pot
Prepare large chicken. Cut into as small pieces as joints allow. Do not remove meats from bones. Boil chicken until nearly tender and keep broth left in kettle when you remove chicken from it. Cut 1 pound of lean, raw ham into small squares. Wash and peel and parboil 8 large potatoes and slice them. Slice 3 medium-sized onions. Put into deep baking dish layer of chicken, layer of ham, layer of potatoes, and layer of onions. Repeat until all are used up; when arranging these layers strew tiny bits of Crisco over them. Pour chicken broth over layers, well seasoned with salt and pepper. Add enough water to almost fill pot. Cover pot, and bake for 1 1/2 hours. Be sure plenty of water is in pot while baking is in progress. When cooked put baked chicken and vegetables in large tureen. Garnish edges with parsley. Sprinkle parsley and sliced cooked carrots over top. Serve with small slice of toast on each plate.
A bone-in layered casserole from a Crisco-era household book, written for cooks who knew their own ovens. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the quantity of fat, and what "lean, raw ham" meant in 1915.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given. The contents are already partly cooked and the bake is effectively a long covered simmer, so a moderate oven (around 350F) will suit the stated 1 1/2 hours.
- Size of birdA "large chicken" of this date was likely an older stewing fowl, heavier and tougher than a modern broiler. A 5 lb roasting chicken works; cut into small bone-in joints and boil only until nearly tender, perhaps 25 to 35 minutes rather than the much longer boil an old fowl would take, or the meat will shred off the bones during the bake.
- Raw hamHere "raw" most likely means uncooked rather than boiled, which may indicate fresh unsmoked ham or a mild green gammon, cut in 1/2-inch dice. Modern heavily cured or country ham is far saltier and will overwhelm the dish; if that is what you have, soak it or reduce it to 1/2 lb and season the broth lightly.
- CriscoShortening was the book's whole reason for existing. "Tiny bits" strewn between layers is unquantified; a few tablespoons in total is enough. Butter does the same job with better flavor, and a well-made broth needs almost none.
- Parboiling the potatoesA few minutes in boiling water is enough. Much longer and the slices risk breaking down into the broth over 90 minutes, turning a layered pot into a thick hash.
- Liquid levelThe instruction to keep plenty of water in the pot is the hinge. Broth to just below the top layer, lid on tight, and a check at the halfway mark; too little and the onions scorch at the sides, too much and you have soup rather than a hot pot.
- Serving and yieldFeeds six to eight. The recipe directs that it be lifted into a tureen, which breaks the layers; bringing the covered dish to the table keeps them intact. The toast is there to soak up broth, so cut it thin and dry it well.
"Hot pot" is a northern English name, generally traced to the Lancashire dish of mutton, onion and sliced potato baked slowly under a lid in a tall earthenware pot, and American cookbooks borrowed the form freely for chicken, veal and beef. This version comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble circulated to promote Crisco after its 1911 introduction, which is why a shortening appears in a dish that has no pastry and needs no frying: the point was to get the product into as many recipes as possible. The layering itself is thrift rather than fashion, a way of making one fowl and a pound of ham feed a table of eight, with the bones left in to enrich the broth as it bakes.