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Scalloped Chicken
Butter a baking-dish. Arrange alternate layers of cold, cooked sliced chicken and boiled macaroni or rice. Pour over White, Brown, or Tomato Sauce, cover with buttered cracker crumbs, and bake in a hot oven until crumbs are brown.
A method rather than a formula: Farmer assumes you have leftover roast chicken, cooked starch and a sauce already in your repertoire. The quantities are yours to set, so the useful guidance is about proportion, moisture and heat.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no numbers, only the word; today the term is generally read as somewhere in the 400-450F range. The dish contains nothing raw, so the oven's only job is to heat it through and brown the crumbs; 20 to 25 minutes at 400F is usually enough.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCommon crackers or soda crackers rolled fine and tossed with melted butter, about 1 tablespoon butter to 1/3 cup crumbs. Panko or dry breadcrumbs behave the same way; unbuttered crumbs tend to dry out and colour patchily rather than browning evenly.
- Sauce quantityThe recipe omits it. Allow about 2 cups of medium white sauce (2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk) for 3 cups of chicken and 3 cups of macaroni or rice, poured in stages so it reaches the bottom layer. Too little and the starch drinks it up and dries out.
- Which sauceWhite sauce gives the plain nursery version; brown sauce, built on the pan drippings or stock, suits darker meat; tomato sauce is the sharpest and the most forgiving of bland leftovers. Season all three well, since cold cooked chicken carries very little seasoning of its own.
- Undercook the macaroniBoiled pasta will soften further in the sauce and oven. Drain it a minute or two short of done, or drop the rice slightly firm, so the finished dish is not pasty.
- Reheating leftovers safelyThis is a cooked-meat dish being reheated. Bring the centre to 165F rather than judging only by the colour of the crumbs, particularly if the assembled dish went into the oven straight from the refrigerator, which adds 10 to 15 minutes.
- YieldA 2-quart baking dish built on the proportions above serves four to six as a main course.
"Scalloped" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks means anything layered in a dish with sauce and crumbs and browned in the oven, a descendant of the older escalloped preparations often said to have been cooked in scallop shells. Recipes like this one are the practical spine of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: Fannie Farmer taught by cross-reference, expecting a cook who had already mastered the white sauce, brown sauce and tomato sauce in the sauce chapter and could now deploy any of them over whatever the Sunday roast left behind. The presence of macaroni as an equal alternative to rice is a reminder that by 1896 dried pasta was an ordinary American pantry staple, treated as a neutral starch rather than as Italian food. Dishes of this kind also reflect the era's icebox economy, where cold cooked meat needed using within a day or two and a hot oven with crumbs on top was the standard way to make it appear at table a second time without apology.