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Scalloped Chicken
Boil 1 young chicken in salted water until tender. When cold, remove the skin and cut the meat into small pieces. Melt 1 heaping tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, add 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, and when well mixed together add 2 cupfuls of rich milk and season with salt and a dash of pepper. Cook for about five minutes. Butter a pudding-dish, put a layer of the sauce in the bottom, then a layer of fine bread crumbs, then the chicken, then some sliced mushrooms. Repeat the process until the dish is filled. Cover the tops with half a cupful of bread crumbs, moistened with butter, and bake for about twenty minutes in a hot oven. Send to the table in the dish it was cooked in.
A plain white-sauce chicken bake that depends entirely on the sauce being thick enough to hold the layers together. Everything else is assembly.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the crumb top while heating a dish whose contents are already cooked.
- The hinge: sauce consistencyOne heaping tablespoon of butter and two of flour to two cups of milk gives a fairly loose sauce. Cook it the full five minutes at a bare simmer so the flour loses its raw taste and the sauce thickens properly; if it is thin going in, the dish will be soupy coming out.
- "Rich milk"Whole milk with a splash of cream, or half-and-half. Ordinary skim milk will not give the body the recipe assumes.
- Chicken size and yieldThe recipe gives no weight; a small young bird of around 3 lb would yield roughly 3 cups of picked meat, enough for a dish of about 2 quarts and four to six servings. The poaching liquid is worth keeping as stock.
- The mushroomsSliced raw mushrooms layered in will shed water into the sauce during baking. Sauté them in butter first until their liquid has evaporated.
- Crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" in this period generally means crumbs made from stale bread rather than the sandy commercial kind. For the top, the half cupful can be tossed with about two tablespoons of melted butter rather than dotting butter over them.
- SeasoningPoaching the bird in salted water seasons the meat, but the sauce needs salt of its own and benefits from a scrape of nutmeg. Taste before assembling; nothing can be corrected once it is layered.
- Pudding-dishAny ovenproof baking dish of about 2 quarts, of the moderately deep sort. Since it goes to the table as it is, choose one you are content to serve from.