Edna May
amallay
CASSEROLE OF CHICKEN
2 cups rice 3 qts. water 1 tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup cream Season to taste Wash the rice thoroughly, place in saucepan with cold water and boil thoroughly for one hour; drain through collander, mash it and add butter, cream, salt and pepper. Brush a casserole mould with butter and cold milk. Press the rice into it and put it aside to cool. When cool, cut out the center of the rice, leaving a wall about one-inch thick around the sides and bottom. Fill the cavity with a fricassee of white meat of chicken. Use the rice taken out for an upper covering. Be careful not to press out the sauce when covering. Brush the top with a beaten egg and put in a quick oven to brown. Pour stewed mushrooms around and serve.
I trust that if any one tries to make and eat this he will survive the ordeal.
With best wishes, LE Fields
This is a rice-crust pie — a bordure de riz in French kitchen terms — and everything depends on the rice being cooked to a paste that will hold a wall. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a chicken fricassee, since none is given.
- The hinge: overcook the rice deliberatelyAn hour in three quarts of water is not an error. You want the grains blown apart and starchy enough to mash into a mortar-like paste that will stand as a one-inch wall. Long-grain rice resists this; a medium- or short-grain rice, or arborio, breaks down more willingly.
- "Casserole" means the vesselIn this period a casserole was the dish itself — here a plain buttered mould or ovenproof bowl, not a baked-noodle-style dish. Any 1.5- to 2-quart round ovenproof bowl or charlotte mould works; the brushing with butter and cold milk is to keep the rice from gripping the sides.
- A quick oven is 425–450°FA quick oven is roughly 400–450°F -- You are only setting the egg wash and colouring the top, since both filling and crust go in already cooked. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough; longer dries the rice out.
- The fricassee you have to supplyPoach about 1.5 lb of chicken breast, cut it in pieces, and bind it in a velouté made from the poaching liquid, butter and flour, finished with cream. Keep it thick — a loose sauce will soak the rice wall and collapse it.
- Season the rice properlyBoiled rice with butter and cream tastes of very little. Salt it firmly, add white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate. "Season to taste" here is doing a lot of work.
- Chill before cutting"Put it aside to cool" means genuinely cold — an hour in the refrigerator. Warm rice tears when you hollow it out. Save every scrap you remove; you need it all for the lid.
- The mushrooms"Stewed mushrooms" means button mushrooms simmered in butter and a little stock or cream, poured round the base as a sauce, not scattered on top.
- YieldTwo cups of raw rice and a pound and a half of chicken feeds six generously as a main course.
The rice border, or bordure de riz, was a standard of late nineteenth-century professional cookery: rice cooked to a paste, moulded, hollowed and filled with a creamed ragoût, which gave a cook a way to make a small quantity of white meat look like a centrepiece. Chicken fricassee in a white sauce was the genteel filling of choice on both sides of the Atlantic, and its blandness was part of the appeal in an era that read pale food as refined. Edna May's fame rested on The Belle of New York (1897), and the contributor notes here suit a performer who married into money and left the stage early — this is drawing-room cooking, not boarding-house cooking. The closing joke and the signature "LE Fields" appear to be a stray from another contribution.