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Chicken a La Creole
Cut a boiled chicken into cubes of an inch. Put a tablespoonful of butter substitute and one of grated onion in a frying pan, add half a cupful of tomato and three sweet peppers cut into strips. Add the chicken, a teaspoon of salt and a dash of red pepper. Cover; serve hot.
A quick skillet dish built on leftover boiled fowl. The instructions stop short of telling you how long anything cooks, which is where most of the work of interpretation lies.
- The hinge: cook the peppers firstThree sweet peppers cut into strips will not soften in the time it takes to warm cubed chicken. Sweat the onion, peppers and tomato covered over low heat for 10 to 15 minutes until the peppers are limp, then fold in the chicken and heat through for 2 to 3 minutes. Chicken that is already boiled only toughens with further cooking.
- Butter substituteMost likely margarine, though the term also covered lard, vegetable shortening and other cheap fats. Its use in place of butter suggests economy, and may point to a period of wartime or dairy shortage. Use butter, or a neutral oil if you want the tomato and pepper flavours forward.
- Boiled chickenA poached fowl, cooled and picked. One inch cubes from a small chicken give roughly 2 to 3 cups of meat, which is the right proportion for the vegetables here. Thigh meat holds up to reheating better than breast.
- Sweet peppersMost likely green bell peppers in the original context. Any sweet pepper works; red and yellow will make the dish noticeably sweeter than intended.
- Half a cupful of tomatoPeeled fresh tomato, chopped, or canned tomato with its juice. It is a small amount by modern standards, meant to moisten and bind rather than to make a sauce, so resist doubling it unless you plan to serve the dish over rice.
- Red pepperCayenne. A dash is perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon; add it with the salt so it has time to bloom in the fat.
- Yield and servingServes roughly three to four. It is dry enough to eat as it is, but rice, grits or toast points will absorb what liquid there is.
"A la Creole" on an early twentieth-century American menu was shorthand for the tomato-onion-sweet pepper combination associated with New Orleans cooking, and it was applied freely to eggs, shrimp, veal and, as here, cold poultry. The formula travelled far from Louisiana through cookbooks and hotel kitchens, usually stripped of the roux, celery, herbs and long simmering that a Creole cook would have taken for granted; what survived was the colour and the pepper. This is in effect a leftovers recipe, a way to give the remains of a boiled fowl a second appearance at table with a French name attached. The call for butter substitute rather than butter may point to a household watching the grocery bill, or to a period when dairy fat was scarce.