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Some Kitchen Kinks: Casserole
Casserole Cookery.
A casserole is a heavy earthenware dish with a cover. A substitute for it can easily be improvised by using any heavy earthenware dish with a heavy plate for the cover. A casserole presentable enough in appearance to be put on the table serves the double purpose of baking and serving dish.
A suitable cut of beef or veal, and it may well be one of the cheaper cuts, as the long, slow cooking insures tenderness, may be cooked in a casserole. manner.
Poultry and other meats besides beef or veal can be cooked in this Chicken cooked in a casserole, which is a favorite and expensive dish in good hotels and restaurants, may be easily prepared in the home, and casserole cookery is to be recommended for tough chicken.
The heat must be moderate and the cooking must occupy a long time.
Hurried cooking in a casserole is out of the question. If care is taken in this particular, and suitable seasonings are used, few who know anything of cooking should go astray. Chopped meat also may be cooked in a casserole and this utensil is particularly useful for the purpose, because the food is served in the same dish in which it is cooked and may easily be kept hot, a point which is important with chopped meats, which usually cool rapidly.
Casserole Roast. 3 or 4 pounds of round or rump of beef.
A slice of salt pork.
A few peppercorns.
One-fourth each of a carrot, a turnip, an onion, and a head of celery cut into small pieces.
Try out the pork. Brown the meat on both sides in the fat. Put in a casserole with the vegetables around it, add 2 cupsful of water or stock.
Cover and cook in a hot oven three hours, basting occasionally. A sauce or gravy can be made with water, flour, and some of the juice left in the casserole.
Casserole or Italian Hash.
Boil one-fourth pound of macaroni, drain and put into a buttered casserole, add a little butter and grated cheese. Push the macaroni to the sides of the dish and fill the center with chopped cooked meat seasoned to suit the taste of the family. A little sausage gives a good flavor to this dish. Place in the oven until hot throughout and serve.
A very good modification of this is made by using raw instead of cooked meat. For this one-half pound of round steak is sufficient for a family of six. This should be cut into small pieces, browned, and cooked until tender in water with the onions and other seasonings. An hour before the cooking is complete, add one-half can of tomatoes. Before serving, the meat may be mixed with the sauce, and the whole is poured over the macaroni.
MEAT COOKED WITH VINEGAR Dishes of similar sort as regards cooking, but in which vinegar is used to give flavor as well as to soften the meat and make it tender, are the following:
Sour Beef.
Take a piece of beef from the rump or the lower round, cover with vinegar or with a half-and-half mixture of vinegar and water, add sliced onion, bay leaves, and a few mixed whole spices and salt. Allow to stand a week in winter or three or four days in summer; turn once a day and keep covered. When ready to cook, brown the meat in fat, using an enameled iron pan, strain the liquid over it and cook until tender; thicken the gravy with flour or ginger snaps (which may be broken up first), strain it, and pour over the sliced meat. Some cooks add cream.
Three workable recipes sit inside this entry, plus a short essay on the vessel itself. The essay and the recipes disagree on oven heat, and that disagreement is the one thing to settle before you start.
- "Casserole" means the potIn this text a casserole is a lidded earthenware vessel, not a baked dish of layered food. A modern Dutch oven, enamelled or bare cast iron, or any heavy covered braiser does the same job; a deep stoneware baker with a plate over it is exactly the improvisation described.
- Ignore "hot oven" for the roastThe opening paragraph calls for moderate heat and long cooking, and that is the instruction to follow. "Hot oven" in period usage generally means something in the region of 400-450F, which over three hours risks boiling the liquid away and toughening a rump. Braise covered at 300-325F and check at two hours; 3-4 lb of round or rump is usually done between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 hours.
- "Try out the pork"Render the salt pork slowly in the pan until the fat runs and the scraps are crisp, then brown the beef in that fat. Two tablespoons of any neutral fat or bacon drippings substitutes if you have no salt pork, though you lose a little of the cured flavour.
- Liquid levelTwo cups of water or stock in a snug pot comes about a third of the way up a 3-4 lb roast, which is correct for braising. Do not cover the meat entirely, and keep the lid on except when basting.
- The hash quantitiesA quarter pound of macaroni is 4 oz dry, about a cup of small elbows. "Half a can of tomatoes" cannot be converted exactly, since cans of the period were generally larger than the modern 14.5 oz standard; a cup or so of tomatoes answers. The text gives a yield only for the raw round steak version, which it says feeds a family of six.
- Chopped meat means chopped, not groundHere "chopped meat" is meat cut small with a knife or run through a hand grinder, and in the hash it is specified as cooked. Cubed braised beef or torn roast chicken behaves better than modern fine ground beef, which packs into a paste in the centre of the dish.
- Ginger snaps as thickenerCrushed gingersnaps for the sour beef gravy is standard German practice, not an eccentricity. Four to six crumbled cookies will thicken two cups of liquid and add the sweet-spiced note that balances the vinegar; whisk them in off the boil and strain.
- Marinate the sour beef in the refrigeratorThe week-in-winter, three-days-in-summer schedule assumes an unheated larder or cellar. Raw beef held several days at room temperature is not made safe by vinegar alone. Use the refrigerator for the full soak, turning daily as directed.
- Acid and metalThe instruction to brown in an enamelled iron pan is deliberate. Bare cast iron, aluminium and unlined copper all react with the vinegar marinade and will grey the gravy and give it a metallic edge. Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel.
The casserole essay catches an English-language shift in progress: the word still names the earthenware pot, borrowed from French, but the phrase "cooked in a casserole" is already becoming the name of a dish, and within a generation an American casserole would mean the food rather than the vessel. The book's argument is economic. Cheap cuts and tough birds were the household cook's real problem, and long covered braising was the answer that hotel kitchens were charging well for, which is why the text points out that chicken en casserole is "a favorite and expensive dish in good hotels" and perfectly easy at home. The sour beef is plainly sauerbraten, carried into American kitchens by German immigration through the nineteenth century, and the gingersnap thickening is the tell; the seasonal marinating schedule is a reminder that the recipe predates mechanical household refrigeration ut in this period ore of the icebox, when the temperature of your cellar in July genuinely determined how long you dared leave meat in a crock.