Home › Entrées › Chicken Croquettes
Chicken Croquettes
salt, pepper, lemon juice 1 cup Croquette Sauce onion juice Cut meat in small pieces; add seasonings and White Sauce. Shape, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. These croquettes may be varied by adding one fourth cup of chopped mushrooms, ham, sweetbreads, or truffles. More or less sauce is required according to the dryness of chicken.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the quantity of cooked chicken is missing — but the method is the standard American croquette of the period, and it works as long as the binding sauce is thick enough and cold.
- The hinge: chill the mixtureNothing in the text says so, but the mixture should be spread on a plate and chilled until firm before shaping. Warm croquette paste will not hold its shape and is liable to burst in the fat.
- Croquette Sauce is not ordinary white sauceIn books of this period croquette sauce is a very thick bechamel, on the order of 4 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup of milk, cooked until it leaves the sides of the pan. Regular pouring white sauce will not bind. Note that the recipe names both Croquette Sauce and White Sauce; they appear to be the same thick binder.
- ProportionsThe missing quantity is probably in the region of 2 cups of finely chopped cooked chicken to the 1 cup of sauce, the proportion given in comparable period recipes. Dry roast meat takes the full cup of sauce; moist poached or leftover braised meat takes less, which is what the closing sentence means.
- Onion juice and lemon juiceOnion juice is grated onion pressed through a sieve — about a teaspoon. It seasons without leaving pieces that break the croquette apart. A teaspoon of lemon juice is enough to lift the whole cup of sauce.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe order given, a first coat of dry crumbs before the beaten egg, is common in period books; the usual explanation is that it gives the egg something to grip so the shell does not slip off in the fat. Use fine dry crumbs rather than fresh, and chilling the breaded croquettes before frying helps them hold.
- Deep fat temperaturePeriod books tested fat by browning a cube of bread in about 40 seconds for cooked mixtures such as this, which is usually put at somewhere around 380-390F in modern terms. That is the right range here, hot enough to set the crust before the interior sauce loosens. Fry only a few at a time so the fat does not cool too far.
- Sweetbreads and trufflesThe suggested additions belong to a hotel-kitchen vocabulary. Sweetbreads must be soaked, blanched and pressed before chopping; chopped cooked ham or sautéed mushrooms are the practical substitutions today.
- YieldOn the assumption of about two cups of meat to a cup of sauce, this would make roughly ten croquettes, serving four or five as an entree course.
The croquette occupies a particular place in turn-of-the-century American cooking: it was the respectable way to serve yesterday's roast fowl to guests. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School book, published about a decade before Lowney's, drilled a generation of cooks in the same sequence — thick binding sauce, chill, shape, crumb, egg, crumb, deep fat — and the technique became a fixture of the entrée course, that small made dish served between fish and roast in the elaborate meal structure of the day. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the dish reached American tables through the professional French kitchen. Lowney's, published by a chocolate company, is best remembered for its confectionery, but it carried a full general repertoire alongside the material that sold the product.