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Chicken Croquettes
2 cups cooked chicken, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon celery salt, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon onion juice, and 1 cup white sauce. Mix ingredients in order given. Cool mixture, shape, crumb and fry in hot Crisco. The white sauce is made as follows: 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk (heated), salt and pepper to taste. Melt Crisco, add flour, then add milk gradually. Cook over fire until smooth and thick. Add seasoning.
A straightforward panada-bound croquette from the Crisco era, written for cooks who already knew the shaping and breading routine. Two things carry the dish: the sauce must be stiff, and the mixture must be thoroughly cold.
- The sauce is a binder, not a gravyFour tablespoons of flour to one cup of milk is roughly double a standard white sauce and is meant to be nearly a paste. Cook it two or three minutes past the point where it thickens so the flour loses its raw taste, or the croquettes will be pasty inside.
- Chill hard before shaping"Cool mixture" understates it. Spread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least two hours, until firm enough to cut. Warm mixture will not hold a cone or cylinder and will burst in the fat.
- "Crumb" means the full three-step breading"Crumb" means more than a dusting of crumbs -- in period usage the instruction generally implies egg-and-crumb, and often a first coat of flour or dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a little water, then crumbs again. A single coat of crumbs will not seal the croquette. Let the breaded shapes rest 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator so the coating sets.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911 and still sold; this book was written in part to promote it. For the frying, any neutral oil with a high smoke point will serve; in the sauce a solid fat or butter behaves more like the original.
- Fry temperatureThe recipe says only "hot." Modern deep-frying practice for croquettes is roughly 350-375F. Below that the crust absorbs fat; above it the outside colours before the cold interior heats through. Two to three minutes, turning once, is enough since everything inside is already cooked.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. It gives flavour without pieces that would break the smooth binding.
- Celery saltStill sold, but modern blends vary in salt content. Taste the mixture before shaping and adjust, remembering that the chicken and the white sauce are each seasoned.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of chicken with a cup of sauce should make roughly eight croquettes, enough for four with a vegetable. Period cookbooks often serve croquettes with a thinner cream sauce or a green pea sauce alongside.
The croquette was one of the great uses for leftover roast fowl in American and English kitchens from the middle of the nineteenth century onward: cooked meat, minced fine, bound with a stiff bechamel, chilled, breaded and deep-fried. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique reached English-language cookbooks through the professional French kitchen, where a very thick paste used as a binder was called a panada. This particular version comes from a promotional cookbook of the Crisco period, when Procter and Gamble published recipe collections to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated shortening could stand in for both butter in the sauce and lard in the frying kettle.