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Chicken Casserole
Singe and clean a small plump chicken as for roasting. Fill with an oyster or chestnut stuffing and truss neatly. Line the bottom of the casserole with three very thin slices of salt pork, lay in the chicken (some like a few slices of onion and the same of carrot added), add one teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper and one pint of Bechamel sauce. Fasten on the cover with a paste of flour and water, and cook in a moderate oven for three hours. Send to the table in the casserole.
A whole chicken braised in a sealed earthenware pot with cream sauce. Two things need attention before you start: the pot is sealed shut with flour paste, and three hours is far longer than a modern bird wants.
- The casserole itselfHere it does mean a lidded ovenproof vessel — a glazed earthenware or enamelled cast-iron pot just large enough to hold the bird, since the dish goes to the table in it. A 4- to 5-quart Dutch oven works, though it will not look as well on the cloth.
- Sealing the lidThe flour-and-water paste is a luting seal, not an ingredient; it traps steam so the bird effectively braises. Mix roughly 1 cup flour with enough water to make a stiff rope, press it around the rim, and crack it off with a knife point when the cooking is done. A tight-fitting lid alone is adequate.
- Moderate oven350F. If you want the long slow treatment the sealed pot implies, 325F is closer to the spirit of it.
- Three hours is too longA supermarket chicken at 350F in a sealed pot is done in about 1 1/2 hours — thigh meat at 165F, stuffing at the same. Note that the recipe itself calls for a "small plump chicken as for roasting," so the three hours reflects the sealed pot and an unregulated oven rather than a tough old bird; three hours will shred a modern one and turn the breast to string. Start checking at 75 minutes.
- Singeing and trussingSingeing burned off the hair-fine pinfeathers left after plucking; a dressed bird today needs nothing beyond a check for stray feather stubs. Trussing still matters here, mainly to keep the stuffing in.
- Salt porkThree thin slices line the pot to keep the skin off the bottom and add fat. Unsmoked salt pork or pancetta is right; bacon works but brings smoke the dish was not built for. Rinse salt pork before using, and taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- One pint of BechamelTwo cups of medium white sauce — about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk. It will thin considerably as the chicken gives up its juices, so make it on the thick side and finish the sauce on the stove if you want it to coat.
- Oyster stuffingShucked oysters folded into a buttered bread stuffing. They should go in whole and raw; they cook through in the bird. If you use chestnuts instead, they need to be peeled and simmered tender first, as they will not soften in the stuffing.
- YieldFour servings from a small chicken, with the sauce spooned over. Boiled or steamed potatoes take up the Bechamel well.
A dish cooked and served in the same sealed earthen pot is very old. The word casserole reached English from French, and around 1900 it still generally meant the vessel rather than the kind of food. The instruction to "send to the table in the casserole" reflects a period in which handsome fireproof earthenware, and later enamelled cast iron, were reaching middle-class households, so serving from the cooking pot was worth remarking on. Sealing a lid with flour paste was a common expedient for anything meant to cook long and undisturbed. The oyster stuffing is a period marker too: oysters were still cheap and abundant on both American coasts, and appear in these books stuffed into fowl, folded into sauces and served in ways that read as luxurious now and were merely ordinary then.