
This sounds fancy but it’s not, and it’s easy, at least the way I do it. It’s a chicken casserole. It’s called chicken divan because it was first made 100 or more years ago at the Chatham Hotel here in Manhattan. Their restaurant was called “Divan Parisien.” We’ll put “Parisien” in special quotes here.
I will be making this on January 20th, 2021. Why? Because when Obama was first inaugurated in 2009 I did a little research beforehand and this was served at a small, subdued dinner back at the White House in 1937 on the day of FDR’s second inauguration. Cousin Matthew, what did you serve on January 20th, 2017? Nothing. It was a Friday that year, so The Better Half and I went for “dinner” with a group of friends at a drag bar/restaurant where I drank copious amounts of bourbon, something I normally shy away from, and the next thing I knew I woke up with a splitting hangover. Thankfully I was in my own bed. We knew we were in for dark days ahead, so why not pretend it was like Berlin in the early 1930s, à la “Cabaret”.
This ingredient list is a little vague and you’ll see why.
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1 supermarket rotisserie chicken
Lots of broccoli heads, sliced into florets. I then slice them in half.
I canister/bag of seasoned breadcrumbs. Try to get a brand with garlic and butter and other spices. The more savory the better.
1/2 stick of butter
About 1/4 cup flour
1 pint milk, not skim. If you want something richer, use half-and-half. Don’t use cream because it might clot or curdle.
1 cup chicken stock
A glug of white wine, about as much as you’d put in a regular wine glass and fill about 2/3 full.
12 or more ounces of Gruyère cheese, grated, but you can use cheddar, grated.
Grease a 9X13 baking dish with good olive oil.
Carve into the rotisserie chicken and give the skin to The Ravenous Hound. The nice thing about this recipe is the chicken should be somewhat shredded and/or cubed, so don’t worry about slicing, like you would when serving a turkey. Make a bottom layer in the baking dish.
Add enough of the sliced broccoli to make a second layer.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
In a saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter and whisk in the flour. Whisk for a few minutes until it’s combined. This, by the way, is a roux, which is a simple way to save many a disastrous meal. Add the milk and whisk. This is béchamel. Add the chicken stock, the wine, and the cheese. Minus the chicken stock this is a basic Mornay sauce. Keep whisking and reduce the heat to a simmer and let it go for 5 or 10 minutes. I’ll confess I haven’t made this often but once I did and this came out watery, so I added more flour and cheese and that was fine.
Pour this concoction over the the chicken and broccoli. You should have enough that it seeps in but doesn’t drown them. Make a layer of breadcrumbs on top. Cover with foil and bake in your preheated 350-degree oven for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 15 minutes.
Casserole veterans will recognize all of this immediately. When I first served this back in 2009, three lifetimes ago, one of my friends/guests, said, “Mattie! You made a hot dish!” She was from Minnesota.
Lovely recipe. Sadly I eat no meat and the carnivore eschews broccoli. Do you think I could sub in tuna? The carnivore could pick out the broccoli. I’m a sucker for a classic white sauce.
Dos he eat cauliflower? I’ve had it with that.
I don’t think so actually because I don’t think the tuna would stand up as well against the sauce, and it would turn out kind of gloppy. Even if you cubed a (cooked) tuna steak I think it would fall apart.
Did I ever tell you (all) that when I was growing up in the 1970s there were five families who were all very close, and mine was one of them. Tail end of the Baby Boom, lots of kids aged let’s say 9 or 10 to 15 or 16. We were The Gang of Five, although we must have had about 20 members. One of the mothers (certainly not mine) loved to cook and she took special joy in feeding kids. I don’t think her family ever had a dinner where there wasn’t at least two or three children present who were not her own. She was a stay-at-home Mom and her husband was a school principal, so he liked kids and understood them and was happy to have us around.
Now the problem was, on a school principal’s salary (at the time anyway, they seem to be quite well-compensated here in NYC) she had to be frugal with her menus. Her mother-in-law was an immigrant from Sicily and taught her everything she needed to know to keep her bambino well-fed and happy, on very little money. She knew I liked Italian food when most kids didn’t (Chef Boy-ar-Dee ravioli and ketchup-based spaghetti sauces would have horrified them, and me as time went on) so I was always welcome when it was Festa Italiana night at their house. I can still taste some of the food, the sardine sauces, these magnificent vegetables ragùs, but most kids shied away from it. And this would have been, say, 1974, not 1954.
There is a point to this: for a wider crowd she was the Queen of the Tuna Casserole. I don’t make them often but maybe you do and can do a FYCE, if no one has recently. I could do one but I’d have to root around to jog my memory. The last time I did it was because the Better Half arrived home one day with a case of canned tuna. 24 or 30 cans, I can’t remember. “What? You always told me that canned tuna doesn’t go bad…” “There are only so many tuna melts and tonnato sauce I can make and would want to eat even over the lifespan of these cans. You know what that means.” “I’ll start calling. You wanna say, a week from Saturday, get here by 6, we’ll eat around 8?” “Yes, invite about 8, so we’ll be 10. Bring wine and lots of it, that’s the price of admission. Tell them I’m going to make a tuna casserole. MY friends will be all for it. YOUR friends, who eat out or order in 7 nights a week and don’t know how to boil an egg or make toast, will decline, I hope. Godspeed, General Helpmeet.”
Yeah, I have to try this. Thank you for posting it.
Hmm… Trying to think of a vegetarian version of this that isn’t just fake chicken (not a huge fan) and I wonder if it’d be good with potatoes? I mean, potatoes and broccoli in a creamy cheesy sauce sounds pretty great.
I think there is a version of this where you use cubed potatoes, you don’t boil them first, and I think it even has its own name, although it could be something like “Potato Cheese and Broccoli Bake.”
My step-mom always made this and it was one of the few recipes she did that I actually liked (she was not a great cook). Whenever I asked her for the recipe, or to show me how to make it, she’d demur and say “oh it’s easy.” This is because she doesn’t really like me and didn’t want me to know. I could have looked it up but frankly I forgot about it the second I moved out. So, now I know!
Nice. Are you somehow (distantly) related to the social media asshole who wouldn’t teach his young daughter how to use a can opener? My mother was not a great cook but one of the many things she did for me, for all of us, was make sure we knew how to read and write, at least on a fundamental level, before we entered kindergarten. I think I was the only kid in my class who could.
My mom, who worked, would show us how to do things once. Cook (she was an awful cook), do laundry, sew something, run the dishwasher, etc. After that, you were on your own. “Mom, my clothes are dirty.” “Washing machine is the big white thing in the garage. Directions are printed under the lid. Good luck.” I was completely prepared to move out and be on my own when the time came.
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, was a housewife, and showed my wife absolutely nothing. It’s a damn good thing my wife married me or she’d have starved to death. She cooks now, but anything tricky she turns over to me.
When I was an upperclassman in college I had a group of friends who had an off-campus apartment. We all did, it seemed, the college only had enough housing for freshmen and then there was a lottery for shabby over-priced dorm rooms…
Anyway, it was a quartet of women and I joined their dining club. One had a car and would do all the shopping. They always had two or three people over. I was a regular, probably three nights a week. I would chip in for the groceries, bring beer or wine, and show up early to help them cook. They all learned from their mothers and/or “housekeepers” (they came from “good families”) and thus my culinary adventure began and the mysterious curtain surrounding cooking was cast aside.
I remember one night one of them brought out a cheesecake for dessert. “You made this?” “Of course I did, where do you think cheesecakes come from, the Enchanted Forest? It’s really easy but I did it this morning before classes because it has to chill so you weren’t here for that but I’ll show you sometime, maybe on a weekend.”
I remember this vividly many, many years later because not only did I get over a fear of cooking, I overcame a fear of trying what seemed impossible.
I’m still friends with this quartet, still alive lo these many years later, and about three years ago the two who didn’t live in NYC were in town so we held a reunion. One of the visitors, to our astonishment, produced a cache of handwritten menus. They would do this sometimes, as a joke, and we’d scribble comments. I had completely forgotten about this. I really pity people who don’t have at least some good memories of and good friends from their college experience. I wasn’t particularly happy but in retrospect it was at least 50% my fault.
I wish I had remained close with more of my college friends, but nearly all of them moved far away. And as we are pretty much all introverts with social anxiety (my sort of people), none of us are particularly good at staying in touch. I do have a video call scheduled with my best friend from college in the next couple of weeks. It’s just a bummer she’s on the opposite coast.
@PumpkinSpies You have to text your dad a pic of you with the dish when you make it!
I have everything on hand to make this, if I cooked the chicken, except whole milk. Arghhh!