For Croquettes
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 can or 14 ears corn 2 tablespoonfuls flour 2 cupfuls milk 1/2 teaspoonful sugar Pepper and salt to taste 1 egg Breadcrumbs For chicken. Draw, wash and dry chicken, then cut into neat joints, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat Crisco in frying pan, add clove of garlic and pepper cut in small pieces. When garlic turns brown take out, put chicken in, fry till brown, then cover closely, allow to simmer till ready. A short time before covering chicken, add tomatoes peeled and cut in small pieces. For croquettes. Drain liquor from can of corn, or grate ears, and chop kernels fine. Blend Crisco and flour together in pan over fire, add milk, stir till boiling and cook five minutes, stirring all the time, add seasonings, and corn, and cook five minutes, then allow to cool. When cold, form lightly with floured hands into neat croquettes, brush over with beaten egg, toss in crumbs and fry in hot Crisco to a golden brown. Drain. Place chicken on hot platter, garnish with croquettes and serve hot.
Two dishes printed as one: a skillet chicken and the corn croquettes that garnish it. Only the croquettes get a proper ingredient list, so the chicken side has to be read as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: chill the corn paste hardThe hinge: get the corn paste properly cold — the recipe says only to let the mixture cool and to shape it "when cold." A spell in the refrigerator until it is firm makes it far easier to handle; warm or barely cool panada will slump in the fat.
- CriscoThe book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which is why it appears in both the roux and the frying fat. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter is fine for the roux, and a neutral oil for frying.
- The corn quantity is inconsistentA standard can drained gives roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of kernels, which is what 2 cups of milk and 2 tablespoons of flour will carry. Fourteen ears would yield several times that — treat "1 can" as the working amount and use about 3 to 4 ears if starting fresh.
- "Pepper cut in small pieces"Most likely a fresh pepper, seeded and diced, rather than peppercorns, though the book does not say which kind. The garlic clove is browned in the fat only to flavour it, and the recipe directs that it be taken out before the chicken goes in.
- No quantities for the chickenFigure one 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces, 2 to 3 tablespoons fat, one clove garlic, one bell pepper and 2 to 3 medium tomatoes. Brown uncovered, then cover and simmer 30 to 40 minutes until the thigh reads 165F.
- Frying temperatureFat at 365 to 375F. Cooler than that and the crumb coating absorbs grease before the surface sets; much hotter and the outside colours before the centre warms through. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- YieldThe croquette mixture makes about 10 to 12 small croquettes, enough to garnish a chicken serving four.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the years after Crisco went on sale in 1911 — a cookbook whose real purpose was to teach American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for both butter and lard, in pastry, in a white sauce and in the deep-fat kettle. That agenda explains why one modest page calls for Crisco three separate ways. The croquette is often said to have been near the peak of its respectability at the time: a stiff cream sauce bound with flour, loaded with something chopped fine, chilled, breaded and fried, it turned leftovers or a can of corn into a dish that looked composed on the platter. Serving them as a garnish around a bird, rather than as a course of their own, seems to have been common enough in the period's dinner-table style, where the visual arrangement of the platter is generally said to have counted for as much as the cooking.