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Chicken Au Gratin
½ lb. cold chicken ½ cupful grated cheese 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) rice 1/2 pint (I cup) tomato sauce A few bread crumbs Salt and pepper Cut the chicken into small pieces. Cook the rice in boiling salted water until tender. Drain well.
Butter an au gratin dish, place a layer of chicken at the bottom, then a layer of cooked rice.
Pour some tomato sauce over this, sprinkle with bread crumbs, grated cheese, and salt and pepper.
Repeat these layers until the dish is full. The last layer must be cheese and bread crumbs. Place in a hot oven to brown.
A tidy way to finish a roast bird, and one of the few gratins that wants no white sauce. The whole thing depends on the layers being wet enough to steam through while the top browns.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F in modern terms. The dish is assembled from cooked ingredients, so nothing is being cooked through; the oven is only there to brown the crumbs and melt the cheese. Fifteen to twenty minutes is usually enough, and a minute under the broiler will finish the top if it is still pale.
- The au gratin dishA shallow, wide, oven-going dish — the point is maximum surface for the browned crust relative to the depth. A pie plate or a small oval baking dish works. Avoid anything deep and narrow, which gives you a soggy middle and a thin cap of cheese.
- The rice measureTwo heaping tablespoons is given as 2 oz, which is dry weight — about 1/3 cup of raw long-grain rice, yielding roughly a cup cooked. Drain it properly and spread it loose; compacted rice turns to paste under the sauce.
- The half pint of sauceThe book glosses it as one cup, so read it as an 8-oz half-pint rather than half an imperial pint of 10 fl oz. One cup for this quantity is the minimum; if your chicken is dry breast meat, err generous or the dish bakes out arid.
- CheeseA cupful and a half grated is a lot for half a pound of meat, and it is meant to be. Any firm, dry, well-flavored cheese does the job — Cheddar, Gruyère, or a mix with a little Parmesan for the top layer, which browns faster and more evenly than Cheddar alone.
- Cold chickenThis is a leftovers recipe and assumes roast or boiled bird already off the bone. Half a pound is the pickings from a small chicken. Cut it small, as directed; large pieces sit as slabs and the layers slide apart when served.
- YieldTwo generous portions or three modest ones, with a green salad. Let it stand five minutes out of the oven so the layers set enough to spoon out cleanly.
Casserole cookery had a small vogue in Britain and America in the earlier twentieth century: single earthenware or fireproof dishes, partly for economy of fuel and partly because such dishes went from oven to table without a serving platter. A Cold Meat Recipes chapter is the practical heart of such a book -- a roast joint or bird was expected to reappear at later meals. Au gratin refers to the browned crust itself, traditionally derived from gratter, to scrape, for the crisp scrapings left clinging to the dish; it came to mean any dish finished with crumbs and cheese under fierce top heat. The tomato sauce and rice here, rather than a béchamel, mark this as a lighter, more domestic version of the form.