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Chicken En Casserole No. 2
I large chicken or turkey 3 tablespoonfuls olive oil 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) flour 1½ pints (3 cups) chicken stock Salt and pepper to season 1 tablespoonful kitchen bouquet 1 cupful chopped oysters Singe, draw and cut the fowl into neat joints, removing the skin and as many small bones as possible. Heat the oil in a frying pan, lay in a few pieces of chicken at a time, and fry until the meat looks white on each side. Turn frequently but do not let them brown.
Take out and drain on paper. Add a little more oil if necessary, until all the pieces have been cooked. Blend the butter and flour in a saucepan over the fire: when smooth stir in the stock, and continue stirring until it cooks for five minutes.
Add the kitchen bouquet and the seasonings.
Strain the sauce into a casserole, add the chicken, arranging the pieces so that they are level at the top, cover closely with a sheet of buttered paper, and put on the casserole lid. Cook in a moderate oven for an hour or until ready. About fifteen minutes before serving uncover and add the oysters scalded and cut into halves.
A gentle braise rather than a roast: the chicken is sealed without colour, then finished in a covered dish in a slow-ish oven. Two things decide whether it works — keeping the frying pale, and holding the oysters back until the last few minutes.
- The oystersThey go in fifteen minutes before serving, already scalded, and only need to heat through. Oysters held in a hot braise for longer than a few minutes shrink and turn rubbery, so treat that final quarter-hour as a maximum, not a target.
- "Moderate oven"350F (175C). At that heat a jointed bird takes about an hour; a large fowl or turkey pieces may want longer, so judge by the meat pulling from the bone rather than by the clock.
- Buy a bird, not a fowl"Singe, draw and cut into neat joints" assumes a whole undressed bird with pin feathers and innards. A 4-5 lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces does the same job; skin it as directed, since the skin will not crisp under a lid.
- Kitchen BouquetA commercial caramel-and-vegetable browning sauce, still sold. It is there for colour and a faint savoury depth, since none of the meat is browned. Gravy browning or a teaspoon of dark soy plus a pinch of sugar stands in acceptably.
- The measurements"11/½ pints" is a printer's mangling of 1½ pints; the book's own gloss of 3 cups is the figure to use. Two ounces each of butter and flour to three cups of stock gives a moderately thick sauce, which juices from the chicken will loosen somewhat during the hour under the lid.
- Frying without colourKeep the oil hot enough to set the surface but move the pieces constantly and work in small batches. If the pan browns the meat, the finished dish tastes of roast rather than of the pale, gentle braise intended here.
- Buttered paperBaking parchment cut to fit, buttered side down on the meat, under the lid. It keeps the exposed tops from drying and darkening; parchment is the closer substitute for the buttered paper the recipe specifies.
- YieldA 4-5 lb chicken serves four to six. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or the sauce spooned over toast would all suit it.
Casserole cookery had a genuine vogue in Britain and America in the first decades of the twentieth century, when glazed earthenware and fireproof china that could go from oven to table were much promoted, sparing the cook a serving dish and the washing of it. The chicken-and-oyster pairing is older than the fashion: oysters were cheap and plentiful on both coasts through the nineteenth century and turn up constantly as an enrichment for poultry, in stuffings, sauces and pies, in much the way mushrooms are used now. Note that the recipe still opens with instructions to singe and draw the bird, a reminder that poultry of the period was commonly bought whole and largely undressed, and that Kitchen Bouquet -- a bottled browning sauce -- was doing the work of colour in a dish where nothing is browned.