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Scalloped Chicken
Put into a shallow dish a layer of cold cooked chicken, then a layer of boiled rice or macaroni and a little tomato sauce and so on until the dish is full. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top, put the dish in the oven and bake until brown.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand a professional cook of 1896 could fill in from memory. The gaps worth closing are oven heat, moisture and seasoning.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no oven heat, only "bake until brown." In a modern oven, 375-400F for twenty-five to thirty-five minutes will heat the interior through and colour the crumbs; the filling is already cooked, so the goal is browning, not cooking.
- The hinge: enough sauceCold chicken and boiled rice both drink liquid, and an underdressed scallop bakes to sawdust. Use enough tomato sauce that each layer is visibly moistened, roughly a cup to a cup and a half for a 2-quart dish, and add a little stock or cream if the mixture looks dry as you build it.
- "Shallow dish"A gratin dish or a 9-inch pie plate. Depth is the enemy here: shallow gives the largest crumbed surface relative to volume, which is the whole point of a scallop.
- BreadcrumbsThe text specifies nothing beyond "breadcrumbs"; dried bread grated fine behaves better here than the sandy commercial kind. Toss them with melted butter, about 2 tablespoons to a cup of crumbs, or they scorch in patches instead of browning evenly.
- SeasoningNothing is seasoned in the text. Salt and pepper the chicken as you layer, and taste the sauce first; cold poached chicken is bland and needs help.
- Reheating leftovers safelyThis is built from meat that has already been cooked and chilled. Take it from the refrigerator to the oven, and bake until the centre is steaming hot throughout rather than just brown on top.
- YieldAbout 3 cups of chicken with 2 cups of cooked rice or macaroni fills a 2-quart dish and serves four.
Scalloping — layering cooked food in a shallow dish with a starch or sauce and browning crumbs on top — was one of the workhorse techniques of nineteenth-century American cookery, applied to oysters, potatoes, fish and, as here, yesterday's roast. The word is generally traced to the scallop shells that once served as the baking vessels, and by the 1890s it simply meant the shallow dish and the crumb crust. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) was not a collection of hotel showpieces but a general household manual of some nine hundred pages, written by a ma"tre d'h"tel whose fame came from the dining room. Recipes like this one, terse to the point of being a memorandum, sit a few pages from far grander things, and suggest a kitchen economy in which a large bird might be roasted once and eaten more than once.