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Escalloped Chicken
Cut cold chicken in small even pieces. Make a white sauce by cooking until smooth a tablespoonful of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour; add cream or rich milk until right consistency and then season with salt and pepper. Pour sauce over chicken. Line your baking dish with bread crumbs, fill with chicken and then cover with bread crumbs which should be first seasoned with a little butter, pepper and salt. Bake until nicely browned. Serve.
A cooked-chicken casserole with no quantities beyond the roux, which is typical of the period: the cook was expected to judge by eye. The numbers below fill the gaps.
- The sauce, in proportionOne tablespoon butter to two tablespoons flour is a flour-heavy roux; add about a cup of milk or cream for a sauce that coats the chicken without running. "Right consistency" here means thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, since it will loosen in the oven as the chicken and crumbs give up moisture.
- Quantity of chickenAbout 2 to 3 cups of diced cooked chicken, the meat off a small bird or roughly a pound, suits a cup of sauce and a 1 to 1.5 quart dish. Serves four.
- Oven temperatureBake at 375F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the oven is only heating it through and browning the top: 25 to 30 minutes, until the crumbs are golden and the sauce bubbles at the edge.
- "Line your baking dish with bread crumbs"Butter the dish first or the bottom layer will weld to it. Use dry crumbs below, where they absorb sauce, and coarser buttered crumbs above for browning.
- Seasoning the crumbs"A little butter" means enough to dampen them and let them brown, roughly 2 tablespoons melted butter to a cup of crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs scorch in patches rather than colouring evenly.
- Season the sauce firmlyCold cooked chicken and the crumb lining are bland, and apart from the seasoned top crumbs the sauce carries the seasoning for the whole dish. Salt it more assertively than you would a sauce tasted on its own.
- Not a scalloped potato dish"Escalloped" here means a dish of cooked food bound in sauce under crumbs, baked only to brown. It does not imply raw ingredients cooking through, so resist adding time.
"Escalloped" (also scalloped) is generally traced to food cooked and served in a scallop shell, and by the late nineteenth century the word had come to mean a mixture layered with crumbs and baked in a shallow dish. Recipes like this one belong to the era's economy of leftovers: cold roast fowl, a spoonful of butter, yesterday's bread reduced to crumbs, and a white sauce.