AS I WAS trudging home through the snow, a simple thought kept me going: I was having an oyster casserole for supper.
When the biting wind hit my face, I reminded myself that soon I would be standing over a stove, basking in the pleasant aromas of sauteed onions, green peppers and garlic. As a snowbank blocked my path at an intersection, I envisioned the steaming mix of cooked oysters and vegetables that would soon be sitting on my supper plate. In short, I needed a major dose of comfort food as an antidote to the massive discomfort caused by this $#@%! cents winter, and the oyster casserole delivered big-time.
"It is an ideal dish for winter, especially this one," said James Villas, whose new book, Crazy for Casseroles (the Harvard Common Press, 2003, $32.95), a compendium of 275 hot-dish recipes, was the source of my supper. Villas spoke to me by phone from his home on Long Island, N.Y.
"As I am talking to you, I am looking out on my deck at a snowbank that has been there for a week," Villas said, painting a dreary picture that was familiar to many beleaguered Baltimoreans.
To lift his spirits on a dark winter evening, Villas said he was cooking a wild-mushroom casserole. I questioned him about a couple of oyster-casserole recipes in his book before settling on one that surrounds oysters with sauteed vegetables, bread crumbs and pecans, then covers them with cream.
Villas is devoted to resurrecting the casserole, a dish that, he said, in recent years has foolishly been scorned by snobs. "The casserole is the soul of America," he said.
Cooks in every region of the country, he said, have taken a favorite food of their area -- in the mid-Atlantic it is seafood -- mixed it with other local ingredients and cooked it in a pot. While the name of that pot, casserole, comes from the French, the recipes and the choice of ingredients, he said, reflect the cooking styles of bedrock America.
Promoted during the Depression as an economical dish, the American casserole reached a summit in the 1950s, Villas said, when James Beard devoted an entire cookbook to the subject. The strength of these early casseroles, he said, was that they primarily used fresh ingredients -- a pleasing pattern that continued into the 1960s.
