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Chickens with Olives
2 young chickens 3 pints (6 cups) water I onion Salt and pepper 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 ozs.) butter 2 dozen olives 1 tablespoonful capers I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) flour Prepare the chickens and cut them into joints, then put them in a casserole with the water, salt, pepper, and onion.
Cook slowly till tender. Lift out the pieces of chicken and drain and dry them, then fry them in the butter till they are brown.
Stir the flour into the casserole, add a pint of the water in which the chickens were cooked, the olives, chopped, capers, and seasoning of salt and pepper.
When quite smooth add the chickens and serve when hot.
A two-stage braise: the birds are poached, browned in butter, then returned to a sauce built from their own broth. Nothing here needs an oven, despite the book's title.
- "Casserole" means the potHere a casserole is the lidded earthenware or enamelled vessel itself, and in this recipe it is used on the stovetop throughout. A heavy Dutch oven or a wide braising pan is the direct equivalent.
- Two young chickensBirds sold as "young" in this period were small, commonly somewhere in the region of 2 to 2 1/2 lb each. One 4-5 lb bird, jointed, gives roughly the same quantity of meat and will need a little longer in the water.
- Cook slowly till tenderA bare simmer, never a rolling boil, for about 35-45 minutes for young birds. Boiling shreds the breast and clouds the broth you are about to turn into sauce.
- Where the flour goesThe instruction is ambiguous: the flour is told to go into the casserole, though the chicken has been browned in butter. If the browning was done in a separate pan, stir the flour into that butter, cook it a minute, then add the measured pint of poaching liquid off the heat and whisk smooth.
- A pint of the waterThat is 2 cups of the poaching liquid, from the 6 cups you started with. Skim the fat off first, and reduce the rest of the broth for another use rather than pouring it away.
- Olives and saltTwo dozen brine-cured green olives, pitted and chopped, plus a tablespoon of capers, bring a great deal of salt. Season the sauce only after the olives have gone in, and rinse the capers if they are packed in salt rather than brine.
- Butter quantityThree ounces of butter is about 6 tablespoons, more than needed simply to brown the joints, but it carries the flour and gives the sauce its body. Do not let it darken past a nut brown or the finished sauce turns bitter.
- Finishing"Serve when hot" means warm the chicken through in the sauce for a few minutes only; it is already cooked and will dry out with further simmering. Serves six with rice or plain boiled potatoes.
Casserole cookery had a vogue in Britain and America, and books of this kind sold the vessel as much as the food: one pot, less washing, and a dish that could be carried in whole. The recipe itself is a plain domestic version of the Mediterranean pairing of poultry with green olives and capers, a combination generally traced to Provencal and Spanish cooking and adapted here by poaching a bird first and browning it afterwards. The result is closer to a fricassee than to anything baked, which is a fair indication of how loosely the word casserole was being used at the time.