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Chicken Croquettes No. 1 (with Brains)
2 chickens, boiled 1 pair veal brains, boiled 1 lemon (juice and one-half the rind grated) 1/4 nutmeg grated salt to taste 2 sprigs parsley 1 teaspoon onion juice cayenne and white pepper 1 pint White Sauce No. 3 Chop or grind the meat as fine as possible, mix meat and seasoning well together and add as much thick white sauce as you dare; it should be very soft, as it stiffens in cooling. Set on the ice until thoroughly cold and firm enough to shape easily. Roll in cork shape, about 1 x 2 1/2 in. Roll in sifted bread crumbs, then in beaten egg diluted with 2 tablespoons milk, then in crumbs again, and set away till needed. Fry as other croquettes. Allow 1/2 lb. raw chicken to a serving.
The croquette method here is ordinary enough, but one ingredient puts the dish out of reach: a pair of boiled veal brains. Bovine brain is classed as specified risk material and is excluded from the human food chain in Britain, the EU and the United States.
- Why the brains rule this outWhy the brains need care -- Brain and spinal cord from cattle are the tissues that carry the BSE agent, and consumption of infected tissue is the route associated with variant CJD in humans. Since the 1990s these tissues have been removed as specified risk material at slaughter, but the rules are age-based: the skull and brain of bovines over 12 months in the UK and EU, and of cattle 30 months and older in the US. Brains from young calves fall outside those bans, so veal brains have not disappeared everywhere, though supply is much reduced and many butchers no longer handle them.
- What the brains were doing hereWhat the brains may be doing here -- The recipe gives no reason for them. Boiled calf brain grinds to a smooth, faintly rich paste, so a textural rather than a flavouring role is a reasonable reading, though in this recipe the softness is expressly carried by the thick white sauce.
- White Sauce No. 3A cross-reference to another entry in the same book, not a proprietary product. The method here calls for "thick white sauce," so the sauce indicated is a heavily thickened binding sauce of the kind used for croquette mixtures; the book's own numbering scheme cannot be reconstructed from this page alone.
- "Set on the ice"The refrigerator, or in 1929 more often the icebox. The mixture must be genuinely cold and firm before shaping, which is why the instruction to add "as much thick white sauce as you dare" is followed by a chilling step rather than immediate frying.
- Quarter of a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates down to roughly two teaspoons, so a quarter is about half a teaspoon. Older books measure nutmeg by the nut because it was bought whole and grated to order.
- Onion juiceNot a bottled ingredient. Onion was grated or pounded and the liquid pressed out through cloth, giving onion flavour without visible pieces that would break the surface of a croquette.