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Chicken Croquettes
Boil two fowls weighing five pounds each till very tender, mince fine, add one pint cream, half pound butter, salt and pepper to taste; shape oval in a jelly glass or mold. Fry in lard like doughnuts until brown. - Mrs. E. L. Fay, New York City.
A terse Victorian formula that assumes the cook already knows how croquettes are made. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The missing binderCream and butter alone will not hold minced chicken together. Period practice was to reduce the cream with flour into a thick panada — roughly 3 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of cream, cooked until it pulls from the pan — then fold in the meat. Without that, the mixture collapses in the fat.
- Chill before shapingThe mixture must be spread on a plate and refrigerated until firm, at least two hours and preferably overnight. Shaping warm paste is the commonest reason croquettes burst.
- The jelly glassA small straight-sided tumbler used as a mould, packed and rapped out to give a uniform cone or oval. Two spoons or a scoop do the same job; aim for about 2 oz each.
- Breading is assumed"Fry like doughnuts" means deep fat, but croquettes need a coating the recipe does not mention: fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again, with a rest in the refrigerator after coating.
- Fat and temperatureLard is still excellent for this and reads as neutral. Bring it to 375F and fry in small batches — the interior is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust, two to three minutes.
- Scale and yieldTwo five-pound fowls give something like 4 lb of picked meat, enough for forty or more croquettes. For a household dinner, halve the recipe: one 4-5 lb chicken, a cup of cream, 4 oz butter.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA five-pound fowl in 1877 was a mature laying hen, tough and deeply flavoured, hence "boil till very tender" — an hour and a half or more. A modern roasting chicken is done in under an hour; poach it gently and save the broth, which the recipe wastes but which improves the panada.
- Season harder than you thinkCold-set forcemeat mutes salt. Taste the mixture before chilling and again after; mace, nutmeg or a little lemon zest appear in a number of croquette recipes of this period.
Croquettes were a fixture of American middle-class cookery from the 1870s onward, and their appeal was frankly economical: they turned the remains of a boiled fowl into something that could be sent to table looking like restaurant food. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the dish arrived through the French-influenced service that ambitious American hostesses were copying in the decades after the Civil War. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and built from contributed recipes, prints this one as it came from Mrs. Fay of New York City. The instructions are notably compressed.