Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Royal Croquettes
Half a boiled chicken 1 large sweetbread 1 calf's brains 1 cup milk 1/4 cup butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 egg 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Parboil the sweetbread and calf's brains and chop fine with the chicken meat; add the egg well beaten. Melt the butter, add the flour mixed with seasonings, add the cream, a little at a time, and cook until smooth. Combine meat mixture with the sauce and set aside to cool. Shape and roll twice in egg and in cracker crumbs, fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper.
This is a croquette of the old boarding-house-luxury sort, and the problem is not the technique but one ingredient. Calf's brains are central nervous system tissue, and that puts the dish outside what can responsibly be cooked today.
- Why the brains disqualify itBovine brain and spinal cord are the specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the agent of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The prion is not destroyed by parboiling, by deep frying, or by any temperature a kitchen can reach, and the disease is untreatable and fatal. Cattle brain and spinal tissue are restricted or banned from the food supply in the US, UK and EU, with the US restrictions keyed to the age of the animal.
- Parboiling is not a safeguardThe recipe's parboil is a firming step, meant to make soft tissue chopable. It has no bearing on prion inactivation, which is the point on which this dish fails. Nothing in the method can be adjusted to make it safe.
- Sweetbreads are a separate questionSweetbread in this period means the thymus or pancreas of a calf or lamb. Thymus and pancreas are not specified risk materials, but they reach the market through the same offal supply chains that BSE controls reshaped, and availability varies by country. If you want a croquette of this kind, work from a current recipe built around poultry or thymus sweetbreads alone.
- Milk or creamThe ingredient list says one cup milk; the method says add the cream. The two do not agree, and the cook has to choose.
- Deep fat, no thermometerFry in deep fat assumes the cook judges heat by a bread cube or by the sound of the crumbs. Croquettes want fat hot enough to set the crust before the interior loosens, and a soft panada like this one will burst if the fat is slack.
- Brown paperBrown paper of this sort was unbleached wrapping or bag paper. Modern kraft bags may carry inks, glues and recycled content that have no business against hot food.
Croquettes were the great economizing entree of American cookery between about 1880 and 1930: cooked meat, a stiff white sauce to bind it, a double coat of egg and crumb, and deep fat. The label royal here seems to come from the trio of chicken, sweetbread and brains, the last two being delicacies a good cook was expected to handle without flinching. Flour-company cookbooks like this one existed to demonstrate that their product could carry a household through every course, and the sauce is thickened with three tablespoons of Gold Medal. Brains and sweetbreads stayed common on American tables well into the mid-twentieth century and then receded, first from changing taste and then, after the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, from regulation.