Chop cold cooked chicken with some mushrooms, parsley and thyme and season with salt, black pepper and cayenne. Add a tablespoonful of butter and 2 well-beaten eggs. Then form into croquettes. Dip in beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs and fry in deep hot lard to a golden brown. Make a cream sauce and serve with the croquettes. Garnish with parsley.
A terse Edwardian formula that assumes the cook already knows how croquettes behave. The quantities are left entirely to judgement, so the notes below fill in the working numbers.
- The hinge: bind with a panade, then chillTwo eggs and a spoonful of butter are a thin bind for chopped chicken in hot fat, and terse formulas like this one may assume a very thick white sauce that the text never spells out (the cream sauce here is for serving). Work the mixture with about a half cup of stiff bechamel per two cups of meat, spread it on a plate and refrigerate at least two hours until firm before shaping, or the croquettes may burst.
- Working quantitiesFor four servings: roughly 2 cups finely chopped cooked chicken, 4 oz mushrooms, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of thyme leaves. That yields eight to ten cork-shaped croquettes.
- Cook the mushrooms firstRaw mushrooms shed water into the mixture and loosen the bind. Sauté them in the butter until the liquid has gone and they squeak, then cool before combining.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is still excellent here and gives a cleaner crust than most oils; any neutral oil works. Bring it to 350–375°F and fry in small batches — three to four minutes, turning once. Below 340°F the crumb coat drinks fat; above 385°F the outside colours before the centre heats.
- Breading"Dip in beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs" works better as flour, then egg, then crumbs. Fine dry crumbs, not panko, give a smooth pale-gold surface. Rest the breaded croquettes 20 minutes in the fridge to set the coating.
- The cream sauceA plain béchamel of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1½ cups milk or half chicken stock, simmered ten minutes and seasoned with salt and a little nutmeg. Make it slack enough to pool on the plate; the croquettes go on top, not under, or the crust softens.
- CayenneNo quantity is given; a pinch is enough, about an eighth of a teaspoon for the whole batch. The point is warmth behind the cream, not heat you can name.
À la reine — "in the queen's style" — was nineteenth-century French kitchen shorthand for a dish of white poultry meat bound in a cream sauce, and it attached itself to vol-au-vents, soups and croquettes alike. The croquette itself is a French invention of the same tradition, a fried shape held together by a stiff sauce; the name comes from croquer, to crunch. Books like this one, which offered a dish a day from a different national kitchen, leaned heavily on French cookery for anything meant to look refined, and croquettes were one common American answer to the question of what to do with yesterday's roast fowl — thrifty food, dressed up with a French name and a napkin of parsley.