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Casserole Cooking (Brown in this a dozen button)
and brown in this a dozen button mushrooms and a dozen or more each of potato balls, slices of carrot, and tiny onions. Add more broth if needed in the casserole and turn in these sautéed vegetables. Season with salt, pepper and paprika and three or four tablespoons of sherry. Leave uncovered in the oven long enough for the chicken to become a rich brown in color before serving.
This is the tail end of a longer casserole-roasted chicken recipe; the page picks up at the garnish stage, so the bird has already been browned and set to cook in broth in a covered pot. What survives here is the finishing method, and it is the part worth copying.
- What "casserole" means hereIn this period a casserole is the vessel: a deep, lidded earthenware or enameled pot that goes from stovetop to oven. A heavy Dutch oven is the closest modern equivalent. The dish is not a layered bake.
- The missing first halfThe instruction "brown in this" refers to fat left in a skillet from an earlier step. The earlier portion is not on this page; a trussed 3-4 lb chicken browned in butter and cooked, covered, in a cup or so of broth in a moderate oven until nearly tender is a reasonable reconstruction, but the weight, the quantity of broth and the temperature are the modern editor's, not the book's.
- Potato ballsCut with a melon baller or parisienne scoop from peeled raw potatoes. A dozen balls is roughly one large potato. Keep them in cold water until they go in the pan or they will grey.
- Sauté the garnish separatelyThe vegetables are browned in a skillet, not in the casserole, so they take color rather than steam. Give the onions and carrots a head start; button mushrooms need only two or three minutes or they weep and stew.
- The uncovered finishThis is the hinge of the whole thing. The recipe says only to leave the pot uncovered until the bird takes a rich brown; it gives neither temperature nor time. In a modern oven, raising the heat to 400-425F with the lid off for the last 15-20 minutes will do it. Baste once or twice with the pan liquid.
- The sherryAdd it with the vegetables so the raw alcohol cooks off during the uncovered browning. Use a dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry, and not the salted "cooking sherry" sold in grocery aisles.
- DonenessPeriod recipes go by tenderness of the joint. Use 165F at the thickest part of the thigh; a whole bird of this size held long enough for a rich brown crust is usually well past that.
- YieldA chicken with this quantity of vegetables serves four, with the pan liquid spooned over as it is, unthickened.
Cooking a whole bird en casserole, sealed in an earthenware pot with a little broth and finished with a garnish of turned or scooped vegetables, is French household technique of the poulet en cocotte kind, and it plausibly reached American cookbooks through the professional kitchen vocabulary of fashionable dining, though the route of transmission is hard to document. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, published a cook book that would have suited middle-class women running a household with limited or no help — an inference from the publisher's market rather than a stated editorial aim — and the casserole was ideal for that reader: one vessel, unattended oven time, and a presentation smart enough to bring to the table. The neatly scooped potato balls and "tiny onions" suggest, though one can only infer it, restaurant garnishing translated for home use, where the labor is the cook's own rather than a kitchen brigade's.