Home › The Principles of Cookery › Fowl, En Casserole
Fowl, En Casserole
Take an earthenware baking-dish with a lid. Cover the bottom with sliced and skinned tomatoes and onions. Disjoint a fowl, and put the pieces in the dish, with salt and pepper to taste and a sprinkling of mixed herbs. Cover with another layer of tomatoes and onions. Add half a pint of stock, cover closely, and cook in the oven very gently for about two hours. Serve in the casserole in which it is cooked, with a napkin pinned round. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
A plain covered-dish braise that depends almost entirely on a long, low oven and a genuinely tight lid. Two details in the original need translating: what a "fowl" was, and how little liquid the dish is meant to have.
- What a fowl is"Fowl" in books of this period usually means a full-grown bird rather than a young chicken, tougher and better flavoured, which would account for the two hours. A supermarket 4-5 lb roasting chicken will be tender in about 75-90 minutes; check at that point rather than trusting the clock.
- Half a pint of stockThis is an imperial pint, so 10 fl oz (about 1 1/4 cups). It should not cover the meat. The tomatoes give up a good deal of juice, and the point is a concentrated braise, not a soup.
- "Very gently" in the ovenAround 300-325F. Above that the tomato reduces too fast and the breast dries before the legs give in.
- The seal is the recipeAn earthenware dish with a loose lid can lose a good deal of its liquid over two hours. Either use a heavy Dutch oven or lay a sheet of parchment or foil under the lid; if the pot is unglazed earthenware, soak it first as the maker directs.
- Skinning the tomatoesWorth doing as instructed -- unskinned tomato peel curls into tough strips over a long braise. Score, scald 30 seconds, and slip the skins off. Out of season, drained tinned plum tomatoes are closer to the intent than pale fresh ones.
- Mixed herbsThe recipe does not say what the mixture contained; dried thyme, marjoram, savory and a little sage would be in keeping, roughly a teaspoon here, as would a bay leaf tucked between the layers.
- BrowningThe original browns nothing, and the result is pale and clean-tasted rather than rich. If you want more depth, brown the joints in butter first; the finished dish will taste noticeably less like the plain braise intended here.
- Finishing and yieldServes four. The sauce will be thin and slightly watery from the tomatoes -- skim the fat and, if you like, reduce a ladleful on the stove and stir it back. The pinned napkin was the conventional way of presenting a hot earthenware pot at table; a trivet does the job now.
The word casserole here still carries its French sense of the vessel rather than the dish: you cook in an earthenware pot with a lid and then serve in it, napkin pinned round, which was probably a small novelty in late-Victorian and Edwardian dining rooms where food was generally expected to arrive on silver or china. En casserole cookery is often said to have become fashionable in Britain around the turn of the twentieth century partly on grounds of economy -- a tough old boiling fowl, past laying and cheap, becomes tender over two slow hours, and nothing is lost in transferring the food from pot to platter. The tomatoes may date the entry too; they are generally reckoned to have become a commonplace English vegetable rather than a suspect curiosity only shortly before, and their liberal use with onion and mixed herbs marks this as one of the lightly Frenchified household recipes that filled such dictionaries. The "probable cost, 3s. 6d." is Cassell's standard reassurance to a cook working to a housekeeping budget.