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Chicken Fritters
1 cup chicken stock 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon celery salt 1/2 cup cold minced chicken Melt the butter, add the flour and salt, cook together. Add gradually the chicken stock and cook until smooth and thick. Pour half the sauce onto a small platter and spread the chicken evenly over the top, then cover with the remainder of the sauce. Cool on ice and cut into inch by two inch pieces. Dip them in Fritter Batter No. 2, fry in deep, hot fat until light brown, drain on soft paper and serve hot.
This is a croquette in fritter clothing: a thick white sauce bound with flour, chilled solid, cut into fingers and fried. Everything depends on the sauce setting firm.
- The hinge: the panada must be stiffThree tablespoons of flour to a cup of stock gives a sauce that sets softly at best. Cook it until it pulls away from the pan in a mass, and if it still looks loose, work in another tablespoon of flour cooked in butter before adding the chicken.
- "Cool on ice" means refrigerateSpread the mixture no more than half an inch deep and chill at least two hours, or until it cuts cleanly without slumping. An hour in the freezer works if you are pressed. Warm pieces will burst in the fat.
- Fritter Batter No. 2A cross-reference to another page of this book. Any standard fritter batter serves: about 1 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2/3 cup milk or water and one egg, beaten smooth and used at once.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "deep, hot fat." Period manuals judged fat by how fast a bread cube browned, a range that works out to somewhere around 360-375F. Cooler and the batter drinks fat; hotter and it colours before the centre warms through.
- Celery saltStill sold, and doing the seasoning work here alongside the plain salt. Half a teaspoon of each in one cup of sauce is assertive; taste the sauce before it cools, since cold food reads as less salty.
- "Soft paper"Unglazed kitchen paper or brown paper at the time; paper towels now. Drain on a rack over the paper rather than directly on it if you want the underside to stay crisp.
- YieldA cup of sauce with the chicken, spread thin and cut at the inch-by-two-inch size given, makes a dozen or so fingers: a first course or luncheon dish for two or three. Scale up freely.
- Chicken and stockWritten for the leftovers of a boiled fowl and its cooking liquid. Poached thigh meat and a good unsalted stock stand in; if using commercial stock, cut back the added salt.
Fritters like this belong to the great turn-of-the-century family of croquettes, cutlets and rissoles built on a flour-thickened panada — the technique that let a household turn half a cup of cold cooked meat into a course worth serving. Gold Medal Flour's cook books, issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, were promotional literature as much as instruction, and it is no accident that the recipe names the brand in the ingredient list and leans on flour twice: once in the sauce, once in the batter. The habit of cooling a bound mixture on a platter "on ice" is a reminder that the refrigerator was still an icebox, and that a cold larder was a resource to be used while it lasted.