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Bean Croquettes
1 pint white beans, 1/2 cup cream, yolk 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon onion juice, 1 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste. Soak beans over night, drain, cover them with fresh water, boil an hour, drain, throw away water, cover with fresh water and boil until tender; drain and press beans through colander. Rub Crisco and flour together, add cream, stir until almost boiling, then add yolks of eggs. Stir again for a minute over fire, add bean pulp and all seasonings; mix and turn out to cool. When cool, form into cylinders, dip in egg, roll in breadcrumbs and fry in hot Crisco. Serve with tomato sauce. Chicken, a la King 1/2 boiled chicken (one pint in thick pieces), 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 fresh mushrooms, 1 cup cream, 1/2 cup sherry wine, yolks 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 green pepper and 1 red pepper, cut in long thin strips. Melt Crisco, add mushrooms, cook 5 minutes. Add chicken, heat through, add salt, wine and the strips of peppers. (The chicken should be removed from bone in long thick pieces.) Beat yolks until light, add cream, cook over boiling water or in chafing dish, stirring constantly until thickened, about 1 1/2 minutes; then pour over hot chicken mixture and serve at once on toast.
Two recipes run together here: bean croquettes bound with a yolk-enriched panada, and a chafing-dish Chicken à la King. Both are workable as written; the notes below cover the vintage measures and the points where they go wrong.
- A pint of beansDry beans were measured by volume, so a pint is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz to 1 lb of dried navy or great northern beans. Cooked and sieved this gives about 4 cups of dry-ish pulp.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook, which is why hydrogenated shortening appears in every line. A tablespoon of butter makes the roux; for frying use a neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- The double boilBoiling an hour, discarding that water and starting again is not fussiness — it removes some of the oligosaccharides that cause gas and any residual soaking bitterness. It also costs you flavour, so season the second pot well.
- Press through a colanderHere the colander is doing the work of a coarse sieve. A food mill or potato ricer does the job faster; a food processor makes the pulp gluey and the croquettes heavy.
- Consistency is the hingeThe mixture must be stiff enough to hold a cylinder. If the pulp is wet, dry it over low heat until it pulls from the pan before adding it to the sauce, then chill the mass thoroughly — at least two hours, or the croquettes burst in the fat.
- FryingThe recipe says only "hot Crisco" and gives no temperature; for croquettes aim for roughly 350-375F, deep enough to float them. Fry in small batches; crowding drops the temperature and the crumb coating soaks.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and squeeze; a teaspoon is about what half a small onion yields. Grated onion pulp works but adds moisture.
- The Chicken à la King yolksBeaten yolks with cream over boiling water take longer than the stated 1 1/2 minutes in most modern setups — go by feel, pulling it the moment it coats a spoon. Held too long or over direct heat it scrambles.
- YieldThe bean mixture makes roughly 12 croquettes, four servings with tomato sauce. The chicken serves two to three on toast.
This comes from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook of the 1910s, the decade in which Procter & Gamble was working hard to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for lard and butter everywhere — hence its appearance in the roux, in the croquette, and in the frying kettle of the same short recipe. Croquettes themselves were a fixture of genteel American cooking from the 1880s onward, a way of turning leftovers or cheap staples into something that arrived at table looking composed; the bean version belongs to the same impulse that produced nut loaves and lentil cutlets, offering a meatless main course at a time when Lenten and "economy" menus were a regular part of household planning. Chicken à la King, printed just below, is generally traced to New York and Philadelphia restaurants of the 1890s, and its several competing origin stories variously credit the diner Foxhall Keene, the chef William King of Philadelphia, and the hotel proprietor E. Clark King — none of them documented well enough to settle.