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Chicken Croquettes (Three-fourths of a pound)
Three-fourths of a pound of chicken cut fine, half a can of mushrooms cut fine, one teaspoonful of grated onion, one tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of flour, yolks of two raw eggs and a glass of sherry. Put onion and butter over the fire and brown; add flour, add liquor from mushrooms; then the chopped chicken and mushrooms, salt, pepper and sherry; stir the mixture over the fire until it begins to boil; take off the fire and stir in the yolks and place on a dish to cool; shape and roll in egg and crumbs and fry in very hot lard.
A standard turn-of-the-century croquette: cooked chicken bound in a thick roux sauce, chilled firm, breaded and deep fried. The recipe assumes knowledge the modern cook has to supply.
- The chicken is already cookedNineteenth- and early twentieth-century croquette recipes were a way of using up boiled or roasted fowl, and the brief time on the stove will not cook raw meat. Use cooked chicken, chopped fine — about 2 cups from three-quarters of a pound.
- Chill it hardThis is the hinge. The mixture as written is a very soft panade and will burst in the fat if it is merely cooled. Spread it in a shallow dish, refrigerate at least three hours or overnight, and shape it cold.
- "A glass of sherry"Genuinely ambiguous. A wine glass of the period was often reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, but larger readings exist. Two ounces is plenty here; a full half-cup will loosen the binding badly.
- Half a can of mushroomsCan sizes varied and the recipe gives no help; a small tin of the period was somewhere in the region of 8 ounces, which would put half a can at roughly 4 ounces drained — about a cup, chopped. The canning liquid is called for as the liquid in the sauce, so reserve it; if you use fresh mushrooms you will need to add stock in its place.
- The yolks go in off the heatStirring raw yolks into the boiling mixture would scramble them. Pull the pan off, let it stop bubbling, then beat them in — they set as the croquettes fry and give the interior its custardy body.
- Frying fat and temperature"Very hot lard" means about 375F. Lard works well and gives a clean flavour; any neutral oil with a high smoke point is a direct substitute. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds, three to four minutes until deep gold.
- BreadingFor a crust that will not split, roll the shaped croquettes in fine dry crumbs, then egg, then crumbs again, and let them rest cold for half an hour before frying.
- YieldAbout eight cone- or cork-shaped croquettes, serving three or four as a main course with a cream sauce or peas.
Croquettes were a common feature of American cookbooks between about 1870 and 1930, and the reason is economic rather than culinary: they turned the last of a boiled fowl into a dish that could be sent to table looking deliberate. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived with the French-influenced service that dominated genteel American cooking of the period — a thick sauce or panade doing the work of a binder, egg yolks enriching it, deep fat providing the contrast. The mushrooms and sherry here mark this as a company version rather than a plain family one; canned mushrooms were a relatively new convenience around 1900 and worth naming, and sherry was a common flavouring wine of the American kitchen cupboard. The insistence on shaping only when cold recurs in contemporary books, which suggests how often the shapes came apart in the pan.