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Snowball Croquettes
Prepare chicken croquettes in the usual way, but with the white meat only, remembering that this will absorb more sauce in mixing than when the whole fowl is used. Form into round balls, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs again. Stick all over them, every quarter-inch or so, pieces of gelatine as it comes from the box. You can vary these croquettes farther by rolling in the center of each one an oyster, parboiled and dried, a slice of truffle or a piece of sweetbread which has been cooked and seasoned.
Make a white sauce of three-quarters of a cup of cream and the same of water in which the fowl was cooked. Season to taste with salt, cayenne, celery salt and onion juice, and thicken in the usual way.
Add, in this case, just a touch of damaskrose color paste.-Anne Warner. See Page XXIII.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's base chicken croquette formula in hand and only tells you how to change it. A few of its instructions are decorative rather than culinary.
- White meat needs more sauceThe note is accurate and worth heeding. Breast meat is drier and less gelatinous than thigh, so a mince of white meat alone will drink up binding sauce. Expect to add sauce until the mixture just holds a shape when squeezed, then chill it hard before forming.
- The gelatine "snow"Boxed gelatine of the period was commonly sold in brittle shreds or strips rather than as the leaf sheets sold now, though granulated gelatine also existed. Stuck into the crumbed surface, the shreds presumably curled and whitened in the fat, which appears to be the point of the name. Modern granulated gelatine will not do this; leaf gelatine snapped into splinters is the nearest equivalent, and the effect is purely visual.
- Chill before fryingThe hinge of any croquette. The formed balls must be refrigerated until firm, ideally an hour, or the shell splits in the fat and the filling escapes. Crumb, egg, crumb again as written, and chill after the final coat as well.
- FryingThe recipe leaves the frying to the book's base croquette formula and gives no temperature. Modern practice for croquettes is deep fat at about 375F for two to three minutes, until the crumbs colour; cooler fat soaks the coating, hotter fat browns the outside before the centre warms through.
- The centresAn oyster "parboiled and dried" means dipped in its own liquor only until the edges ruffle, well under a minute, then patted dry. Longer and it turns to rubber inside the croquette. Sweetbreads must be soaked, blanched, peeled and pressed before they are cooked and diced.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A teaspoon of the juice carries the flavour without the water or texture of chopped onion.
- Damask rose color pasteA pink food colouring sold in paste form for confectionery and cake work. Any modern gel paste in a soft rose gives the same effect. Use the smallest amount that tints the sauce, or the pink reads as artificial rather than delicate.
- The sauce and yieldThe sauce -- Three-quarters of a cup each of cream and chicken cooking liquor makes about a cup and a half of sauce, thickened "in the usual way" with a roux of roughly two tablespoons each butter and flour. The recipe gives no yield or number of servings.
Croquettes were everywhere in American cookery between the 1880s and the First World War: a way to turn cold roast fowl into something that looked like company food, and a natural fit for the chafing-dish and luncheon-menu enthusiasms of the period. The interest here is almost entirely in the presentation. Naming a dish for its appearance, tinting the sauce rose, spiking the crumbs with shredded gelatine so the fried surface bristles like snow, belongs to a style of cooking in which visual invention counted for a good deal. Anne Warner, to whom the recipe is credited, may be the American novelist of that name, then popular for her Susan Clegg stories, but the attribution cannot be confirmed from the page itself.