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Chicken and Nut Croquettes
Free from skin and bone and chop fine sufficient cold cooked chicken to measure 1 scant pint. Blanch, dry and chop 2 dozen almonds or the same number of walnut meats. Scald 1 cupful of milk in a double boiler. Rub together to a paste 1 tablespoonful of butter and 2 tablespoonfuls of flour. Blend a little of the hot milk with this, turn into the double boiler and stir until very thick. Cover and cook for ten minutes. Mix nuts and chicken and add a very high seasoning of salt and pepper, 1 teaspoonful of lemon juice, a few drops of onion juice and 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley. To the cream add salt and pepper and the chicken, mix well, cook for a moment, and turn out on a buttered plate. When chilled, dust the hands slightly with flour and form into cylinders, or pyramids. Slightly beat 1 egg, add 1 tablespoonful of warm water. Into this dip each croquette, taking care that every point is wetted. Lift out and roll in fine, dry crumbs. Place in a basket, a few at a time, and plunge into deep, smoking hot fat. When brown, drain on paper before serving.
A standard croquette formula: a very stiff white sauce binds the meat, and everything depends on that binding being firm enough to shape. Nothing here is unsafe, but the fat temperature needs a number.
- The hinge: the sauce must be paste-thickThe hinge: the sauce must be very thick -- One tablespoon butter and two of flour to one cup of milk is roughly double the flour of a thin pouring sauce, and after the ten minutes' covered cooking it should be thick enough to mound on a spoon rather than pour. If it slumps, the croquettes may burst in the fat.
- Chilling is not optional"When chilled" means thoroughly cold and set — two hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Warm mixture cannot be shaped and will leak.
- A scant pint of chopped chickenThat is a little under 2 cups, which takes somewhere in the region of 10 to 12 oz of picked cooked meat. Dark and light mixed gives better flavour than breast alone.
- Fat temperature"Deep, smoking hot fat" was judged by eye; smoking actually means the fat is breaking down. Use 375F and fry in small batches so the temperature holds. Two to three minutes browns them; the filling is already cooked.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. A few drops is right — a quarter teaspoon or so.
- Blanching the almondsPour boiling water over them, stand a minute, and slip off the skins; dry them well before chopping or they will make the mixture damp. Walnuts need no blanching, only chopping.
- Crumbs"Fine, dry crumbs" means dried breadcrumbs, not fresh, and not panko — the coating should be close and even so no filling escapes. Let the breaded croquettes rest 15 minutes before frying to set the crust.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, serving four as a main course with a vegetable, or six as a first course. The "basket" is a frying basket; a spider or slotted spoon does the same work.
Croquettes were the great thrift dish of American cookery between about 1880 and 1930, and their logic is visible in this recipe: a small quantity of cold roast meat, stretched with a flour-and-milk panada, seasoned "very high" because the binder itself is bland, and dressed up by deep frying. The word is generally traced to the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique was popularised in part by the French-influenced cooking schools of Boston and Philadelphia, whose graduates wrote a share of the household manuals of the period. The nuts here do double duty — they add fat and texture where the meat has been economised. The chicken is a flavouring more than a portion.