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Filling (Cup milk or chicken stock)
1 cup milk or chicken stock 1 tablespoon shortening 1 tablespoon flour 2 cups finely chopped chicken 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 eggs, well beaten Scald chicken stock and stir into it shortening and flour, mixed together. Cook and add the chicken, salt, pepper, onion juice, lemon juice and egg yolks well beaten. Cool. Cut potato eggs in halves, crosswise, remove a portion from the center of each half, fill, place halves together and fry in deep fat. When serving, place upright on a dish and garnish with parsley.
This is the forcemeat for a fried stuffed-potato dish — duchesse-style potato shaped into ovals, hollowed, filled and deep fried. Everything hangs on the filling being cold and stiff before it goes into the potato.
- Chill it hardChill it well -- the mixture wants to be cold and firm before it goes into the potato, not merely "cool" as the recipe puts it. A slack filling is far likelier to burst out in the fat.
- The sauce is a very thick panadaThe sauce is thin for the job -- One tablespoon each of fat and flour to a cup of liquid gives a thin white sauce by the usual reckoning, period or modern. The egg yolks and the two full cups of chopped chicken do most of the thickening; cooking the sauce down a little will stiffen it further.
- Eggs — the original is inconsistentThe ingredient list calls for 2 eggs, well beaten, while the method adds only the yolks. Two yolks stirred into the hot sauce off the heat is the safer reading; whole eggs make the filling looser.
- Do not scramble the yolksTake the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a spoonful of the hot sauce, then return everything and cook gently for a minute or two. Boiling after the yolks go in curdles the filling.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient: a halved onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth. A teaspoon of finely grated onion, or a small pinch of onion powder, substitutes without changing the texture.
- ShorteningMeans any solid fat — lard, vegetable shortening or butter. Butter tastes best here and there is little enough of it to matter.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only "deep fat." Modern practice for croquettes is around 375F; much lower and the potato drinks oil before it colours, much higher and the outside browns before the centre warms through.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of potato and no count of potato eggs, so the yield cannot be worked out from the text; two cups of chopped chicken will fill a good many halves.