Boil a fat hen well seasoned with salt, pepper, 1 sliced onion, 2 green peppers and 2 cloves of garlic. Remove the chicken and chop fine and mix with chopped parsley, the grated rind of ½ lemon, ½ teaspoonful of paprica and a pinch of nutmeg. Add a little chopped tarragon and chervil and 2 beaten eggs. Mix with the sauce and form into croquettes. Then dip into beaten eggs and fine bread-crumbs, and fry in deep hot lard a golden brown. Serve hot. Garnish with fried parsley and serve tomato-sauce in a separate dish, flavored with chopped mango chutney.
A workable croquette, but the recipe assumes knowledge it never states: the binding sauce is missing entirely, and without it the mixture will not hold. Read the points below before starting.
- The missing sauce"Mix with the sauce" refers to a thick panada or reduced white sauce, taken for granted in 1900s croquette practice — roughly 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 1 cup of the strained chicken broth or milk, cooked until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. Reckon about 1 cup of thick sauce to 3 cups chopped chicken; any wetter and the croquettes burst in the fat.
- Chill before shapingThe mixture is best spread on a plate and chilled until firm, an hour or two, before forming. Warm croquette paste takes a coating badly and is apt to fall apart in hot fat.
- A fat henAn older stewing bird, typically something like four to six pounds, with more collagen and flavour than a young roaster. A modern 4-5 lb chicken works; simmer it gently 1 to 1½ hours rather than boiling hard, and keep the broth for the sauce.
- Green peppers and garlic"Green peppers" here are almost certainly sweet bell peppers, used for aroma in the poaching liquid rather than heat. The recipe has you remove only the chicken, which implies the aromatics stay behind in the broth, though it never says so.
- PapricaThe period spelling of paprika, and at this date usually mild Hungarian sweet paprika.
- Deep hot lard375F is the working range; a thermometer replaces the bread-cube tests of the era. Lard fries beautifully but any neutral fat with a high smoke point does the same job. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into the hot fat for 10 to 15 seconds, until crisp and still green. They spit; a lid held as a shield is sensible.
- The chutney tomato sauceChop the mango chutney fine and stir it into warm tomato sauce off the heat, so the sugar in the chutney does not catch. Taste before adding more — commercial chutneys vary wildly in sweetness and salt.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bird gives roughly 16 to 18 croquettes, serving six to eight as a main course.
Croquettes were the standard genteel answer to cooked meat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: bind chopped leftovers in a stiff sauce, crumb, fry, and the dish arrives at table looking deliberate rather than thrifty. The "Indian" label in a book of this kind rarely signals an Indian recipe so much as an Anglo-Indian gesture and, above all, the mango chutney folded into tomato sauce, chutney having been a fixture of British and American grocery shelves since the Victorian trade in bottled Indian condiments. The fine herbs alongside it (parsley, tarragon, chervil, lemon rind) are straight French kitchen practice, and the combination is characteristic of the period's "dishes of all nations" genre, which cheerfully assembled a national identity for a dish out of one or two imported flavourings on a thoroughly Franco-American base.