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Chicken Croquettes
2 cups chopped chicken 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1/8 teaspoon paprika 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley 2 eggs bread crumbs Melt butter in saucepan; mix in flour and add cold milk slowly, stirring until smooth and creamy; add seasoning and parsley. Boil 3 minutes. Add chicken; mix well and pour out on platter to cool. When cool enough to handle take a large spoon of the mixture in floured hands; shape into balls, cones, or oval cakes and put into cold place until firm. Dip in bread crumbs, then in eggs beaten with 2 tablespoons cold milk, then in bread crumbs. Lay on plate which has been sprinkled with bread crumbs. Fry in deep hot fat, and drain on brown paper.
A standard croquette formula: a thick white sauce binds chopped cooked chicken, the mixture is chilled until sliceable, then breaded and deep-fried. Two details in the original will trip up a modern cook.
- The binding sauce is the hingeTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of milk gives a sauce that is only just stiff enough. Cook it until it is genuinely thick and pulls from the side of the pan, and chill the mixture at least two hours (overnight is better) or the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- "Boil 3 minutes"This means a gentle bubbling simmer while stirring, which cooks out the raw flour taste. A hard rolling boil in a thin pan will scorch the milk on the bottom.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for two cups of chicken is heavy by current taste, especially with Worcestershire alongside. Start with one teaspoon and correct the cooled mixture before shaping.
- The breading orderAs written it is crumbs, then egg, then crumbs. That works, but flour, then egg, then crumbs is the more reliable sequence; either way let the coated croquettes rest 20 minutes in the refrigerator so the crust sets.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no number; "deep hot fat" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 360-375F. Fry three or four at a time so the temperature does not crash, roughly 2 to 3 minutes, until deep gold — the filling is already cooked, so you are only heating it through and setting the crust.
- Brown paperGrocers' paper was the period draining surface. A wire rack set over a sheet pan is better; paper towels will steam the underside soft.
- The chickenAlmost certainly written for cooked meat off a boiled or roasted fowl, though the recipe says only "chopped chicken." Two cups is roughly 10 to 12 oz of cooked meat; chop it fine rather than shredding, or the croquettes will not hold a shape.
- YieldProbably around 10 to 12 croquettes, enough for four, though the recipe gives no yield. A cream or mushroom sauce alongside was a common accompaniment.
Croquettes were one of the great economies of the American middle-class kitchen between the 1880s and the 1930s, and a great many general cookbooks of the period carry a run of them — chicken, veal, salmon, rice, sweetbread. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique reached American home cooking largely through the French-influenced cooking-school teaching associated with figures like Fannie Farmer and Sarah Tyson Rorer. The point was to make a small quantity of expensive cooked meat feed a family by extending it with a flour-and-milk panada and giving it a crisp fried exterior. The Worcestershire sauce here is a distinctly Anglo-American touch: bottled sauces were the era's shortcut to savoury depth.