Chicken Cacciatore, a Not So Classic Version

Way back in 1966 we visited my paternal uncle, his wife and his two youngest kids in Connecticut. We all spent one day in New York City, where we stopped at an automat, a restaurant concept, apparently developed in Berlin, Germany, where customers bought the prepared foods they wanted from vending type devices, with little windows showing each dish. Money was inserted and the customer could open the window and take out the dish. If I remember right, all dishes were separate; that is, if you wanted chicken cacciatore, which I took (hey, you should have known there was a story here), you inserted the money, opened the window and took the cacciatore, then if you also wanted mashed potatoes, which I did, you went to that window and went through the same process, and if you also wanted a salad, same process, and then if you wanted pie or cake for dessert you did the same. I believe it was also that way if you wanted bread and butter. Well that chicken cacciatore was the best I've ever had, and I still remember it to this day, but I've never found it duplicated, and my mother was a great cook. Whenever I hear the words chicken cacciatore, I think of that automat in 1966. It's a simple Italian dish. This recipe is as close as I've come to duplicating that version from so many years ago. Many recipes for chicken cacciatore I've seen over the years are more like very tomato-y pasta sauce, but the type at that automat was more of a broth with some tomatoes in it. I bake my chicken cacciatore, rather than cooking it stove top.

Ingredients:

8 pieces of chicken, mixed light and dark meat, barely dusted with flour
3 tablespoons regular olive oil (plus more to initially brown the chicken)
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1  14.5 ounce can chopped tomatoes, "barely" drained; that is, still with a little juice
1 large green pepper, cut into fairly large pieces
1 large onion, roughly cut into big pieces
2 large cloves garlic, chopped
1  14.5 ounce can chicken broth (low fat/low sodium is fine)
3 tablespoons dry white wine (not sweet)
2 teaspoons dried oregano

Preheat oven to 350 (F). Meanwhile, lightly brown the flour dusted chicken in a little olive oil in a skillet. Put all ingredients, except chicken, into an ovenproof pan or casserole dish. Stir to mix. Add chicken pieces, cover the pan and bake until the chicken is tender.  

With mashed potatoes, just as I had in New York City, but I added some cottage cheese for this serving

WORD HISTORY:
Cacciatore-This word, related to both "chase" and "catch," is a base word "caccia," with a suffix, "tore." The suffix goes back to Indo European "tor," a suffix used to show a person or thing that participates in the activity expressed by the base word to which it is connected. This gave Latin the suffix "tor," with variations in ending forms depending upon usage, and the same was passed onto Italian, and to Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan as "dor," and onto French as "(t)eur." The base word goes back to Indo European ""kahp," which had the notion of "seize, grasp, take." This gave Latin "captio," with the same meanings, as well as "to understand;" that is, "take in knowledge." This then produced Latin "captiare," meaning "to grasp for," which then gave Italian "cacciare," meaning "to hunt, to chase." When the parts were combined for a noun, it produced "cacciatore," meaning "hunter." English borrowed the word in the 20th Century purely from the Italian dish typically served with chicken or rabbit.