Home › The Principles of Cookery › Chicken Fritters
Chicken Fritters
Cut the meat from a dressed chicken into thin neat slices. Flour these well, or, if preferred, draw them through egg, and cover them with bread-crumbs which have been mixed with a little flour, pepper, and salt. Melt a little butter in a small frying-pan; when hot, put in the slices of meat, and cook them gently, turning them once or twice during the process. When brown, pile them on a dish, and send brown sauce or tomato sauce to table with them. If preferred, the slices may be dipped in batter and fried in hot fat, like kromeskies; or, to make them more tasty, they may before being floured be put into a marinade made of a little chopped parsley and onion, pepper, salt, and the juice of a lemon.
A leftovers dish dressed up for the table: cold cooked chicken sliced, coated and fried. Almost everything hinges on the fact that the meat is already cooked.
- "A dressed chicken"In Victorian cookery 'dressed' most often means cooked, and this dish reads as a way of using up a cold roast or boiled fowl; but the word can also mean simply plucked, drawn and trussed, i.e. oven-ready. If the meat is already cooked, the frying serves only to colour the coating and heat the slices through; if it is raw, they must be fried long enough to cook through completely.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe gives no thickness; something around a quarter of an inch is a reasonable reading of "thin neat slices". Thicker pieces risk drying out before the crumb browns, thinner ones tend to break up in the coating.
- KromeskiesKromeskies were minced or chopped meat, often wrapped in bacon, dipped in batter and deep-fried; the origin of the name is generally given as Polish or Russian but is not settled. The reference here simply signals the frying method: a thin coating batter and fat hot enough to brown it quickly. The book gives no temperature.
- Brown sauceThe brown sauce meant here is a stock-based made sauce of the espagnole family, not the bottled condiment sold under that name in Britain today. Any well-reduced chicken or veal gravy serves the same purpose.
- The marinadeParsley, onion, lemon juice, pepper and salt function here mainly as seasoning rather than as a tenderiser, especially if the meat is already cooked. A short soak of half an hour or so is enough; prolonged contact with the acid will bleach the surface of the meat.
- Drying before coatingIf the marinade is used, blot the slices before flouring. Wet meat sheds its crumb in the pan, which is the usual reason this dish comes out patchy.
- Fat quantity"A little butter" in a small pan means shallow frying; butter alone browns fast at this heat, so half butter and half a neutral oil holds the colour better without changing the flavour much.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. The breast and thigh meat from one chicken would make roughly four modest servings as a lunch or supper dish, fewer if served as a main course.
Fritters of this kind belong to the great Victorian economy of the cold joint: a roast bird appeared hot at one meal, sliced cold at the next, and reappeared a third time crumbed and fried with a sauce to disguise its origins. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery is full of these re-dressings, and the alternatives offered here — flour, egg-and-crumb, batter, or a marinade first — show the format at work: one basic idea with a ladder of refinements according to how much time and how much butter the kitchen could spare. The nod to kromeskies places the dish in the loosely French-influenced repertoire that English cookery writers of the later Victorian period drew on, where a foreign name lent respectability to what was, in plain terms, fried leftovers.