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Croquettes
1½ cups cold chicken 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 cup milk or stock 1/2 teaspoon onion juice 12 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice Dash of nutmeg 1 egg Bread crumbs and beaten egg Cook the flour in the seasonings and chicken. beaten; mix and cool.
Cook the flour in the butter; add the milk gradually; then the Remove from the fire; add the egg, well Shape in small cones; dip in another
A standard chicken croquette: a very thick white sauce bound with egg, chilled until firm, shaped, crumbed and fried. The instructions in this printing run together, but the sequence is the usual one.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe panada must be spread on a plate and refrigerated until cold and stiff, at least two hours, before shaping. Warm mixture will not hold a cone and will burst in the fat.
- Working orderMelt the butter, cook the flour in it a minute or two, add the 1/2 cup milk or stock gradually to make a thick sauce, then stir in the chopped chicken and seasonings. Off the heat, beat in the whole egg, then cool.
- The salt lineThe salt quantity has lost its figure in this printing; treat it as 1/2 teaspoon, which suits 1 1/2 cups of meat and a half cup of liquid.
- Onion juiceGrate a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or press a cut half against a rasp grater. A teaspoon of very finely grated onion does the same work.
- CoatingThe final step is the standard sequence: crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again, and a rest of 15 minutes in the refrigerator so the crust sets.
- FryingDeep fat at around 375F, until deep gold; small cones colour in a couple of minutes. The filling is already cooked, so the object is only to heat through and crisp the shell; hotter fat browns the crumbs before the centre warms.
- Cold chickenAlready-cooked meat, chopped fine, not shredded, and not ground to paste. Leftover cooked bird is the likely source.
- YieldPerhaps eight small cones, on the quantity of meat and sauce given; the recipe itself states no yield and no accompaniment.
Croquettes were one of the great economies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century kitchen: a thick panade of butter, flour and milk stretched a cup or two of leftover meat into a dish that looked deliberate rather than salvaged. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and cone and pyramid shapes were common in the American cooking-school books of the period.