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Chicken en Casserole
Cut two small, young chickens in pieces for serving. Season with salt and pepper, brush over with melted butter, and bake in a casserole dish twelve minutes. Parboil onethird cup carrots cut in strips five minutes, drain, and fry with one tablespoon finely chopped onion and four thin slices bacon cut in narrow strips. Add one and one-third cups Brown Sauce and two-thirds cup potato balls. Add to chicken, with three tablespoons Sherry wine, salt and pepper to taste. Cook in a moderate oven twenty minutes, or until chicken is tender. If small casserole dishes are used allow but one chicken to each dish.
Farmer's casserole chicken is a fricassée in disguise: the birds are browned briefly, then finished in a covered dish with a made brown sauce. The two things to settle before you start are what the sauce is and how big the chickens are.
- Brown SauceThis refers to the book's own recipe, a butter-and-flour roux cooked dark and moistened with brown stock. One and one-third cups is a modest amount, meant to coat rather than submerge. A good demi-glace or a well-reduced brown chicken stock thickened with a dark roux does the same work.
- "Small, young chickens"Broilers, probably in the range of 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb each, cut up for serving. Modern supermarket birds often run 4 lb and up; one of those, jointed, can replace the pair, though the pieces will take longer to cook through.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as 350F, and that is the only heat the recipe names. No temperature is given for the first twelve-minute bake; a hotter oven, around 425F, will colour the buttered skin, but that is a modern gloss rather than the book's instruction.
- Total time is optimisticThirty-two minutes of oven time suits small broiler pieces only. With larger jointed chicken, expect 40 to 50 minutes at 350F once the sauce is added; go by an internal temperature of 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, not the clock.
- Potato ballsCut from raw potatoes with a melon baller or a French vegetable cutter, about the size of a large marble. Two-thirds cup is roughly one medium potato. Keep them small; larger pieces will not soften in the time given.
- The casseroleHere the word means the vessel: a lidded earthenware or enamelled dish that goes from oven to table. A Dutch oven or any covered braiser works. Keeping it covered during the second stage stops the sauce reducing to paste.
- Carrots and baconParboiling the carrot strips five minutes before frying is worth keeping; it helps ensure they are tender by the end. Bacon of the period was often saltier than much of what is sold now, so taste before adding further salt.
- YieldTwo small chickens serve four to six. The closing line simply allows one whole chicken to each dish if small casseroles are used.
The word casserole here still means the pot, not its contents — the shift in American usage, where a casserole became any dish baked and served in one vessel, came later. Cooking and serving in the same lidded earthenware dish was associated with French practice and became fashionable on English and American tables over the later nineteenth century. The supporting cast of carrots, bacon in narrow strips, potatoes turned into balls, sherry, and a made brown sauce belongs to the French-influenced repertoire the Boston Cooking School taught as good cookery, scaled down to a household kitchen. Small young chickens were more or less seasonal before year-round poultry production, so a dish calling for two of them was likelier company food than everyday food.