Betty Lives!

How America Eats

Clementine Paddleford

1960

Oh my god, this casserole was an enormous undertaking. I don’t know what I was thinking. Actually, what I was thinking was that I wanted to make a chicken dish and I had a ton of leftover sourdough bread so what the hell. I must have had a brain fart because this dish took two days, has four different parts and yields enough for 20 servings.

First, you boil a roasting chicken in water along with chopped carrot, onion and salt. I added celery, peppercorns, parsley stems, bay leaves and my secret chicken soup ingredient: star anise. The chicken and broth are cooled and then the chicken is stripped of its meat and skin, which are ground together. I thought this step was extremely intelligent; the skin here serves the same purpose as fat in hamburgers or sausages. After the boiling, stripping and grinding I refrigerated it all and went to bed.

The next day I made a stuffing from onion and celery (sauteed in chicken fat from the broth) along with poultry seasoning, dried sage and my leftover bread, all moistened with the broth. Then came a classic white sauce which called for 1 cup of the same chicken fat, 1 cup of flour, 4 cups of hot broth, 1 cup of milk, and 4 eggs. Illustrating how we’ve bred all the good (read: fat) out of modern chickens, my broth yielded barely a 1/4 cup of fat and I had to supplement with some duck fat I had in the fridge. When I had measured out 3/4 cup of fat into the pan I just couldn’t bring myself to add more, it was too gross. Ditto with the eggs. I only got to two before I got weak and put them away. Neither Doug nor I has high cholesterol but I was afraid this casserole might put us into dangerous territory.

The recipe says to layer the ingredients in a 4-quart casserole but since I only have a high-sided 3-quart Pyrex, I used that instead and increased the number of layers. I laid out stuffing, sauce, ground chicken and repeated up to the top which I finished with sauce and then sprinkled with dry bread crumbs. Again, I left out the 1/4 cup of melted butter out of fear for my health. I baked it at 350 degrees for 30 minutes and then let it rest. Every element was so white that it was hard to differentiate the layers. My son took one look and asked, “Is that dinner?” When I nodded he said simply, “I’m not eating that.” As I’ve mentioned, he does not like white foods.

Doug and I LOVED it. I declared it to be the “essence of chicken” thanks to - god help me -all the chicken fat. It was even good cold, and re-heated two days later for another dinner. At the rate we’re going it might be finished by August.

On another, sadder note, Ms Paddleford attributes the casserole to Mrs. Robert E. Bogue of Wichita, KS. Mrs Bogue was a former Miss Kansas in the Miss America Pageant and she is described in the book as something of a supermom to her three children. Unfortunately, those children didn’t turn out to have such storybook lives. You can read about it here.