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CHICKEN (en Casserole)
Dress a young chicken and cut into pieces for serving. Melt three table-spoonfuls of butter in a frying pan, add an onion and a small carrot, each cut in slices, add the chicken, and cook until delicately browned. Remove to the casserole, add one and a half cupfuls of white stock and bit of bay-leaf. Cover and let the whole cook an hour, or until nearly tender, then add some potatoes cut in slices and a few mushrooms stewed lightly in butter, season with salt and pepper, and cook until quite tender. Add three table-spoonfuls of sherry and serve at once. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. (See also POULET EN CASSEROLE.)
A straightforward braise that assumes you have a covered earthenware pot and a chicken that still needs plucking. Two or three words need translating; the method itself holds up.
- "Dress" the chickenIn this period it means pluck, singe, draw and truss — the bird arrived whole and feathered. Buy a 2.5-3 lb chicken and joint it into eight pieces.
- The casseroleA lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that goes from fire to table, not a shallow baking dish. Any heavy Dutch oven does the job; a 5-quart size is ample.
- Stovetop or ovenNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not say where the covered pot was to sit. If you use an oven, a low setting of around 325F gives steadier heat than a burner and needs less watching.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock of veal or chicken bones. Ordinary light chicken stock is the modern equivalent; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which fights the point of the dish.
- Timing the chickenThe hour suits a bird of the period; a supermarket chicken is likely tender in 30-35 minutes, so add the potatoes at around 20 minutes and check the breast pieces early -- they dry out well before the legs.
- The mushroomsStewing them separately in butter first is not fussiness. Added raw they release water into the braise and turn grey; a few minutes in a hot pan keeps their texture and colour.
- The sherryThree tablespoonfuls stirred in at the very end, just before serving; adding it off the heat helps the aroma survive. Use a dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry.
- Yield and costServes four. The '3s. 6d.' is a Victorian estimate of what the ingredients would cost; it has no modern equivalent.
En casserole means nothing more than "in the pot" — the French word names the vessel, a lidded earthenware dish that could be set among the coals and carried straight to the table, and only later drifted in English to mean the food inside it. Cassell's, compiled for British households in the later nineteenth century, was busy absorbing French restaurant vocabulary for a middle-class readership, which is why this entry sits alongside a cross-reference to poulet en casserole. The sherry finish and the white stock mark it as a genteel dish rather than a peasant one.