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Chicken Chartreuse
Prepare and cook same as Casserole of Rice and Meat, using chicken in place of lamb or veal. Season chicken with salt, pepper, celery salt, onion juice, and one-half teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
This is a cross-reference recipe: everything but the seasoning comes from the entry for Casserole of Rice and Meat earlier in the chapter, where boiled rice lines a buttered mould, cooked chopped meat fills the centre, and the whole thing is steamed and turned out. A few things need translating before it will work on a modern stove.
- The hinge: use cooked chicken, not rawThe parent recipe assumes cold cooked meat chopped fine and moistened with stock or gravy. Raw chicken will not cook through reliably inside a rice-insulated mould in the steaming time given. Poach or roast the bird first, or use leftovers.
- What the mould isA plain buttered charlotte mould, pudding basin or small metal bowl, packed with an even half-inch layer of rice against the sides and bottom. Butter it generously and the chartreuse will turn out clean.
- Steaming time and methodCover the mould tightly with buttered paper or foil and steam over simmering water about 45 minutes, until heated through to 165F at the centre. A covered pot with a rack and an inch of water does the job.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient made by grating an onion and pressing out the liquid, or scraping a cut half with a spoon. Half a teaspoon is about right here; grated onion or a pinch of onion powder substitutes without much loss.
- Celery saltStill sold. Season with it first and hold back the plain salt until you have tasted.
- The riceBoil long-grain rice until quite soft and slightly sticky so it packs and holds; a firm al dente grain will collapse when the mould is inverted.
- ServingFarmer serves the parent casserole with tomato sauce; a well-seasoned white sauce or chicken velouté suits the chicken version better. Unmould onto a warm dish and let it settle a minute before cutting.
- YieldA quart mould feeds four to six as a main course, depending on how much chicken goes into the centre.
A chartreuse in classical French cookery is a moulded dish in which one thing is concealed inside another and revealed when the mould is turned out — traditionally game or poultry hidden within an arrangement of vegetables, and the name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, whose meatless diet supposedly encouraged the disguising of meat under vegetables. By the time it reached the Boston Cooking School it had become something much plainer: a rice-lined mould around chopped cooked poultry, a way of turning yesterday's chicken into a dish that could be brought to table whole. Fannie Farmer's habit of writing one full recipe and then a string of variations on it — casserole of rice and meat, then chartreuse, then the next — is characteristic of the book's method, which treated cookery as a set of transferable procedures rather than a collection of unrelated dishes.