Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Vegetables › Chicken Croquettes (One large chicken boiled very)
Chicken Croquettes (One large chicken boiled very)
One large chicken boiled very soft; two or three sets of brains boiled in a muslin bag (previously soaked in salt water) tied up; when cooked chop the chicken and brains until they are as fine as you can get them; season well with salt, pepper, parsley chopped fine, the juice and little of the grated rind of one lemon. Add one cup of suet minced fine. I use butter, as I do not like suet, one cup three-quarters full. If too stiff add a little cream; make into shape; have plenty of lard boiling hot. Dip them in cracker crumbs and fry like an oyster. The softer and more creamy they are the better, just so they can be made without falling to pieces. A sauce made with tomato sauce, with mushrooms sliced, or mushrooms and truffles, served with croquettes is nice; with sweetbreads, also. You can have them without this sauce if you like. -Mrs Bickham, New Orleans.
The croquette base here is roughly half chicken, half brains, and that second ingredient is the reason this one belongs on the page rather than in the pan.
- Brains as a bulk ingredient"Two or three sets of brains" alongside one chicken makes offal a substantial proportion of the forcemeat, perhaps a third or more. The recipe does not say what animal they come from; calf brains were the commonest sort sold for cooking in this period, but the recipe gives no indication either way.
- Bovine brain is a prohibited tissueBovine brain is a restricted tissue -- Brain and spinal cord from older cattle are classed as specified risk material in the United States, the EU and the UK because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and may not enter the food chain; brains from young cattle are still legally sold in some jurisdictions but not others. The prions responsible are not destroyed by boiling or by frying, so no cooking step makes contaminated tissue safe. Check what is lawful and available where you are before treating this as a workable recipe.
- "Boiled very soft" is not a temperatureThe chicken is simmered to shreds, which is fine, but the brains are cooked in a muslin bag with no time given, and the finished croquettes are deliberately kept "soft and creamy" so they barely hold together. A short fry in lard sets the crumb coating without reliably heating a loose, wet, offal-rich interior through.
- If you want the dish itselfChicken croquettes bound with a thick veloute or panada, without brains, are a standard modern preparation; use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the rest of itFor context: "a cup three-quarters full" of butter is about three-quarters of a cup, roughly 12 tablespoons; "fry like an oyster" means a brief deep-fry in fat hot enough to brown quickly; and the recipe offers the tomato-and-mushroom sauce, with truffles, as an optional accompaniment for croquettes or sweetbreads rather than a requirement.
Croquettes were one of the great uses for cooked meat in American cookery between about 1870 and 1930 -- a way of turning a boiled fowl into something that looked like restaurant food, crisp outside and almost liquid within. Brains and sweetbreads were cheap, respectable and widely eaten then; cookbooks of the period treat them as ordinary rather than adventurous, valued precisely for the creamy texture this recipe is chasing. The attribution to a New Orleans contributor fits the sauce, which reads like a Creole household's version of a French sauce tomate garnished with mushrooms and truffles. The dish fell out of the repertoire less from squeamishness than from supply: after the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, brain from older cattle was excluded from the legal food chain across much of the West, and recipes like this one became historical documents.