Home › Meats and Poultry › Chicken en Casserole
Chicken en Casserole
Dress a young chicken and cut in pieces for serving. Melt three tablespoons of butter in an omelet 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 one-half cups of white stock and a bit of bay leaf. Cover and let cook an hour or until nearly tender, then add some potatoes cut in slices and a few mushrooms sauted in butter, season with salt and pepper and cook until tender. Add three tablespoons of sherry and serve at once.
A straightforward braise, written when "casserole" still meant the pot rather than what came out of it. The main adjustment is time: an hour of simmering was aimed at a bird with far more connective tissue than anything sold today.
- The casserole is a potIn 1900s usage the casserole is a lidded earthenware or enamelled vessel that goes on the stove or into the oven. A Dutch oven or any heavy lidded pot of 4-5 quarts does the job.
- Omelet panSimply a shallow, wide frying pan with sloping sides. Use a skillet large enough to brown the chicken pieces in one layer without crowding.
- Dress a young chicken"Dress" means pluck, singe and draw; you are buying that already done. A 3 to 3 1/2 lb broiler-fryer, cut into eight or ten serving pieces, is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Timing is the hingeModern chicken is tender in 30 to 35 minutes of gentle simmering, not an hour. Judge by the thigh reaching 175F and the meat loosening from the bone; a full hour will leave the breast dry and stringy.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from raw bones rather than roasted ones. Unsalted chicken stock is the nearest thing on a shelf, and being unsalted matters here since the liquid reduces.
- Potatoes and mushroomsAdd the sliced potatoes about 20 minutes before the end so they cook in the braise; the mushrooms are already sauteed and only need to warm through. Cut the potatoes no thicker than 1/4 inch or they will lag behind the chicken.
- The sherryThe recipe adds it at the very last moment and serves at once; stirring it in off the heat keeps it aromatic. A dry or medium-dry sherry suits the dish; cream sherry will read as sweet against the stock.
- YieldFour servings, with the potatoes standing in for a starch on the side. There is not much sauce, so serve it straight from the pot.
The phrase en casserole appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century along with a wave of French-inspired one-pot cookery, and for a while it described a method rather than a category: food cooked and brought to the table in the same earthenware pot, as distinct from a stew turned out into a dish. The white stock, the bay leaf and the finishing spoonful of sherry are the marks of that borrowed French idiom, filtered through American domestic-science writing; within a generation "casserole" had drifted in the United States to mean the baked dish itself, which is why the title reads oddly now.