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Scalloped Chicken
Chop as fine as dice the meat of a cooked fowl. Thicken the liquor in which it was boiled with butter and flour and season with pepper and salt. Fill a pudding dish with alternate layers of bread crumbs, chicken and sliced cooked potatoes. End with crumbs at the top. Then pour over the gravy (enough to moisten the dish), add a few bits of butter and bake till brown.
A frugal use-up dish written for cooks who had just boiled a fowl and had both meat and broth on hand. The instructions give no quantities, so the proportions are yours to set.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given; bake at 375F for 30-40 minutes, until the top is browned and the gravy bubbles at the edges. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring the crumbs.
- "Thicken the liquor"In effect a velouté, though the recipe does not say how it is to be done: make a roux with equal weights of butter and flour, then whisk in the hot cooking broth. About 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of liquid gives a gravy that clings without setting solid.
- A cooked fowlA "fowl" meant an older stewing hen, boiled long and slow for a strongly flavoured broth. A supermarket roasting chicken of 4-5 lb, or the carcass and meat from a rotisserie bird simmered with an onion and a bay leaf, stands in fine.
- The hinge: enough gravyThe line "enough to moisten the dish" is doing the real work. Bread crumbs drink liquid greedily, and an underfilled scallop bakes dry and mealy. Pour until you can see gravy rising between the layers when you press the top lightly, and keep any surplus hot to spoon over at the table.
- CrumbsUse dry or stale crumbs rather than fresh soft ones, which turn to paste. The top layer benefits from being tossed with the butter bits before it goes on, so it browns evenly rather than in patches.
- Pudding dishA deepish earthenware or glass baking dish, roughly a 2-quart capacity. Butter it well: the starch from the potatoes will stick otherwise.
- SeasoningBoiled fowl and boiled potatoes are both bland, and the only seasoning specified is salt and pepper in the gravy. Taste the gravy before it goes in and push the salt further than you think you need; a scrape of nutmeg or a little chopped parsley between the layers is period-appropriate.
- YieldA 2-quart dish built from one bird's worth of meat serves six as a main course with a green vegetable.
Scalloped dishes take their name from the shell — the English scallop shells once used as individual baking vessels — and by the late nineteenth century the word had come to mean any mixture layered with crumbs and a sauce and browned in the oven. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in that same spirit of practical household management, and this recipe is a clear example: nothing is wasted, the boiling liquor from the fowl becomes the sauce, and cold potatoes bulk out a small amount of meat. Recipes of this kind assumed a bird had been boiled whole for another meal, which is why the instructions begin at the point where most modern readers would need to start much earlier.