Curries and Pies
First carve them entirely into joints, then remove the bones, beginning with the legs and wings, at the head of the largest bone; hold this with the fingers, and work the knife as directed in the recipe "Fowl, To Stuff and Bone."
The remainder of the bird is too easily done to require any instructions.
Fowl, Croquettes of. (An Entrée). -INGREDIENTS.-1 or 2 shalots, or lemon and herb flavouring, 1 oz. of butter, 1 tea spoonful of flour, white sauce; pepper, salt and pounded mace to taste; teaspoonful of pounded sugar, the remains of cold roast fowls, the yolks of 2 eggs, egg and breadcrumbs. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold fowl, 6d.
FOWL, CURRIED.
Mince the fowl, carefully removing all skin and bone, and fry the shalots in the butter; add the minced fowl, dredge in the flour, put in the pepper, salt, mace, pounded sugar and sufficient white sauce to moisten it; stir to it the yolks of 2 well-beaten eggs, and set it by to cool. Then make the mixture up into balls, egg and bread-crumb them and fry a nice brown. They may be served on a border of mashed potatoes, with gravy or sauce in the centre, or dry.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry the balls.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Fowl and Rice, Croquettes of. (An Entrée).- INGREDIENTS for small dish. - lb. of rice, 1 quart of stock or broth, 3 oz. of butter, minced fowl, egg and breadcrumbs. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the fowl, 9d.
Put the rice into the above proportion of cold stock or broth, and let it boil very gently for 1/2 hour ; then add the butter, and simmer it till quite dry and soft. When cold, make it into balls, hollow out the inside, and fill with minced fowl made by recipe. The mince should be rather thick, Cover over with rice, dip the balls into egg, sprinkle them with bread-crumbs and fry a brown. Dish them, and garnish with. fried parsley. Oysters, white sauce, or a little cream, may be stirred into the rice before it cools.
TIME.- hour to boil the rice, 10 minutes to fry the croquettes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two croquette recipes for using up cold roast chicken, both built on the same idea: a thick, well-seasoned mince bound and coated, then fried. The mixture must be properly cold before shaping or the balls will burst in the fat.
- Chill before shapingThe recipe directs only that the egg-yolk-bound mince be "set by to cool"; let it cool until firm before shaping. A warm or slack mixture will slump in the crumbs and split open in the pan.
- ShalotsModern shallots, one or two, finely chopped. The alternative given — "lemon and herb flavouring" — is unspecified in the text; presumably a little lemon zest with herbs in place of the onion.
- Pounded maceGround mace, the outer covering of nutmeg. A generous pinch is enough; nutmeg is a close substitute at slightly less than the same quantity.
- White sauceA thick béchamel, not a pouring one. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mince just holds together — too much and the croquettes cannot be rolled.
- FryingFry at around 350–375F. The recipe allows ten minutes, but at that temperature the balls colour in three to four minutes, and the filling — cold cooked fowl — is already cooked.
- QuantitiesSeveral amounts in this text are incomplete — the sugar, and the weight of rice in the second recipe. The rice quantity is missing its fraction; a stiff, dry result with 1 quart of stock and 3 oz butter will need somewhere in the region of a quarter to half a pound, but the original figure cannot be recovered from this page.
- Cooking the riceThe text gives a quarter of an hour's very gentle boiling before the butter is added, then simmering "till quite dry and soft"; go by the rice rather than the clock. A short-grain rice will bind more readily than long-grain.
- YieldThe meat of one cold roast chicken will make a modest dish of croquettes; the recipe gives no yield. Serve on a ring of mashed potato with gravy poured into the centre, as directed.
Croquettes were a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian entrée course precisely because they solved a household problem: what to do with the Sunday fowl on Monday. Mrs Beeton's books are organised around this economy, and the phrase "the remains of cold roast fowls" recurs throughout them. The technique itself is French — croquette from croquer, to crunch — and its arrival in English kitchens tracks the broader mid-nineteenth-century adoption of French service and French terminology by middle-class households aspiring to the standards of grander tables. Mace, sugar and lemon in a savoury mince point back further still, to an older English seasoning habit that survived in made dishes long after it had left plain roasts.