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Chicken Chowder
Take small pieces of chicken and cook tender, cut in dice pieces and allow one oyster, cut fine, to one shell; then prepare the mixture which must be made of drawn butter, (use milk instead of water); season this and turn on the chicken and oysters; then fill the shells, place a few bread crumbs on the top and bake brown.
Despite the name, this is not a soup: it is a creamed chicken and oyster mixture baked in individual shells, closer to what most books of the period called a scallop. The wording assumes you already know how to make drawn butter, which is the part that needs translating.
- Drawn butter, with milkDrawn butter in American cookbooks of this era is a flour-thickened butter sauce, not the clarified butter the term means today. Made with milk instead of water, as directed, it is a plain béchamel: roughly 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk for four shells, cooked until it coats a spoon.
- The shells"One oyster to one shell" means large scallop or clam shells used as individual baking dishes, an ordinary piece of kitchen equipment then. Shallow ramekins or gratin dishes of about half a cup hold the same amount.
- Do not overcook the oystersThe oysters go in raw, chopped, and finish in the oven; the short bake is enough, so there is no need to precook them.
- "Bake brown"The book gives no temperature. A hot oven, in the region of 400-425F, for roughly 12 to 15 minutes should brown the crumbs and heat the filling through without drying it. The mixture goes in already cooked, so browning is the only goal.
- SeasoningThe original says only "season this." Salt, white pepper and a little cayenne or mace are seasonings often found in creamed oyster dishes of the period; a spoonful of the oyster liquor stirred into the sauce adds more than any spice will.
- CrumbsBread crumbs alone can scorch before they brown evenly. Toss them with melted butter first; many period recipes direct buttered crumbs explicitly.
- YieldAbout a cup of diced cooked chicken, a cup of sauce and four to six oysters fills four to six shells, which is a light supper for three or a first course for six.
The title is loose even by the standards of its own time. Chowder, generally traced to the French chaudi\re which fishermen's stews were made, meant a soup of layered fish or clams with salt pork and crackers; what is described here is a scalloped dish, baked dry in shells. The slippage suggests a household cook naming a favourite by feel rather than by rule, which is common in the supper chapters of American cookbooks. What is entirely of its period is the pairing itself: oysters were cheap and abundant on both American coasts through the nineteenth century, and were used the way cooks now use bacon or stock cubes, as a savoury lift to bland meat. Chicken and oysters together appear constantly in these books, in pies, croquettes and creamed dishes, and the scallop shell was one of the vessels used for serving small hot portions at a supper table.