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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 substitute and bake in a casserole dish twelve minutes. Parboil one-third 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 twothirds 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.
A straightforward braise dressed in French clothing: chicken browned briefly in a hot dish, then finished with a garnish of carrot, bacon, potato balls and brown sauce. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwelve minutes plus twenty is optimistic for bone-in pieces unless the birds are genuinely small. Go by an instant-read thermometer: 165F at the thickest part of the breast, 175F in the thigh, and give the dark meat longer if needed.
- "Two small, young chickens"Broilers of roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb each, the sort of small bird such recipes usually assumed. One 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces is the practical modern substitute, though the pieces will be larger and slower to cook.
- Butter substituteMargarine or vegetable shortening. Substitutions of this kind were common in periods of butter economy, though the recipe itself gives no reason. Butter, or a neutral oil if you want a higher smoke point for the initial browning, works better.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or a simple demi-glace: a brown roux slackened with strong beef or veal stock and simmered down. A cup and a third of good reduced stock thickened with a beurre manie gets you close without a day's work.
- Potato ballsCut with a melon baller from peeled raw potatoes. The recipe parboils only the carrots; parboiling the potato balls alongside them is the safer course, since raw balls are unlikely to soften in twenty minutes.
- A moderate ovenGenerally taken as about 350F. The recipe gives no temperature for the initial twelve-minute bake; a hotter oven, around 425F, would colour the buttered skin, after which drop the heat once the garnish goes in.
- The casserole dishHere it really is a baking dish, not the saucepan sense the word often carries in books of this age. Earthenware or enamelled cast iron with a lid; cover once the sauce is added so the chicken does not dry out.
- SherryThree tablespoons of dry or medium sherry, added with the sauce rather than at the end, so the raw alcohol cooks off. Cream sherry will make the dish cloying.
- YieldServes four to six, or four generously if you use one modern chicken. The individual-dish note assumes very small birds.
"En casserole" appears in American cookbooks from around the turn of the twentieth century as part of a broader borrowing of French domestic cookery, and it originally described the vessel rather than the dish: food cooked and brought to table in the same lidded earthenware pot. The garnish here -- carrots, bacon and scooped potatoes -- is close to what a professional kitchen would have called a garniture bourgeoise. The instruction to brush with "butter substitute" points to a period of butter economy, though on its own it will not date the book precisely: American cookbooks offered oleomargarine and vegetable shortening as alternatives over several decades.