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Chicken Croquettes (Take the remnants of cold)
Take the remnants of cold chicken and chop the meat fine. Also chop an onion for each chicken. Fry the onion in a little butter, adding half a spoon of flour; stir a minute, then add the chopped chicken and a gill of broth, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Stir for two minutes. Put all back on the fire, stirring gently.
Spread the mixture on a dish, and put it away to cool. When cold, stir the top well in with the rest, and if very dry, add a little broth. Divide into parts on the paste board of about a tablespoon to each. Have bread-crumbs on the board; make the parts round, dipping each one into beaten eggs, then into the bread-crumbs, and fry in hot lard. Serve hot. All kinds of meat may be made into croquettes after the same manner.
A thrifty use for cold roast chicken, written when croquettes were the standard way to serve up yesterday's bird. The recipe assumes you know how thick the mixture must be, and that is the whole difficulty.
- The hinge: the mixture must be stiffHalf a spoon of flour and a gill of broth per chicken barely binds anything; if the paste does not hold a firm shape when cold, it will burst in the fat. Work with a thicker base — closer to a heavy white sauce, roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1/2 cup broth per 2 cups chopped meat — and chill it until genuinely firm, several hours or overnight.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces in American usage (the imperial gill is 5 fluid ounces).
- "Half a spoon of flour"Genuinely ambiguous. Period spoon measures ranged from a teaspoon to a serving spoon, and no size is stated; judge by consistency rather than trying to convert it.
- One onion per chickenThat is a great deal of onion for a delicate croquette. A small onion, or a couple of shallots, finely minced and cooked until soft without colour, suits modern palates better.
- The muddled middleThe instruction to "put all back on the fire" after two minutes of stirring is redundant as printed — the mixture never left the pan. Cook the meat, broth and seasoning together only until it thickens and pulls from the sides, then spread it out to cool.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is still excellent here, though any neutral fat works. Bring it to 365–375F and fry in small batches; below that the crumbs soak, above that the coating browns before the centre warms through.
- CrumbingDry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and a double coat — crumb, egg, crumb — gives a shell that will not split. Rest the coated croquettes in the refrigerator 20 minutes before frying.
- YieldAbout a tablespoon each; the recipe quantifies nothing beyond that, so the count depends entirely on how much meat is left. A modest bowl of leftovers will make a first course for four, rather more if the mixture is stretched with sauce.
Croquettes were a mainstay of the late-nineteenth-century leftover economy: a cooked meat, a stiff thickened sauce to bind it, a crumb coat, and hot fat. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form reached American and British household cookery through the professional French kitchen, where a similar mixture bound with a heavy b"," "