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Casserole Cooking (To the casserole when the meat)
to the casserole when the meat is partially cooked, and, at same time, add the salt. Finish the cooking, adding more sauce if necessary as the heat dries it up, and if broth is too thin when ready to serve, thicken slightly with browned flour rubbed smooth in water. The total time for cooking this dish should be almost two hours.
This is the tail end of a longer set of directions — the opening, with its meat and vegetables, sits on the preceding page — but the finishing technique it describes stands on its own and applies to almost any braise.
- What "casserole" means hereIn Butterick's day the word still meant the vessel: a deep earthenware or metal pot with a tight lid, used on the range or in the oven. A modern Dutch oven is the direct equivalent.
- Oven and heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only a warning that the heat dries up the sauce. A braise of this kind wants a bare simmer rather than a boil: in modern terms a low oven or the lowest steady flame on the stovetop. Anything brisker will tighten the meat before the connective tissue has time to soften.
- Salt added lateThe instruction to salt when the meat is partially cooked is a common direction in period braising recipes, though no reason is given here. Salting part-way through does let you judge seasoning against liquid that has already reduced, rather than over-salting a broth that will concentrate.
- Topping up the liquidAdd more sauce or stock hot rather than cold; a cold splash drops the pot temperature and stalls the cooking. The recipe asks only for enough to replace what the heat has dried up.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured. Browning weakens its thickening power, so noticeably more is needed than for raw flour; the recipe leaves the quantity to the cook and asks only that it be rubbed smooth in water first. Its purpose is colour and a faint roasted flavour as much as body.
- The two hoursThe text sets the total cooking at almost two hours. Judge by a fork sliding out of the meat without resistance rather than by the clock; tougher cuts can want longer.
Butterick published cook books alongside its dress patterns, aimed at women running households without much or any help, and casserole cooking suited them: one covered pot, cheap cuts, little watching, and a dish that came to the table in the vessel it was cooked in. The word itself is French, from casse, a pan or ladle, and in English it long named the pot itself; the modern American sense of 'a casserole' as a baked mixture belongs to the twentieth century. Browned flour, called for here as a thickener, belongs to the same thrifty tradition, and nineteenth-century cookery writers commonly advised keeping a supply of it on hand for gravies and brown sauces so that colour could be had without long reduction.