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Chicken and Mushroom Croquettes
Make as Chicken Croquettes I, using one and one-third cups chicken meat and two-thirds cup chopped mushrooms.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the base croquette recipe in front of you: a very thick white sauce (a panada) bound with cooked meat, chilled hard, shaped, crumbed and fried. The mushrooms change one thing that matters — moisture.
- The hinge: cook the mushrooms dry firstTwo-thirds cup of raw chopped mushrooms will release several tablespoons of water into the binding sauce and the croquettes will slump or burst in the fat. Sauté them in a little butter until the pan is dry and the liquid has gone before folding them in.
- Keep the total volume the sameThe base recipe calls for two cups of chopped cooked chicken; here the mushrooms take a third of that. Do not add them on top of a full measure of chicken or the sauce will not bind the mixture.
- Mushrooms as sold then and nowIn the 1890s this most often meant commercially cultivated mushrooms, fresh or canned. Canned mushrooms need draining and blotting; if you use them, skip the sauteing but expect a softer, saltier result. Cremini work well and hold their flavour against the white sauce.
- Chill before shapingThe mixture must be spread on a plate and refrigerated until genuinely firm — an hour at least, longer is better. Warm croquette paste cannot be rolled and will not hold a crust.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 375–390°F. The period test was a cube of bread browning in about forty seconds; a thermometer is more reliable. Cooler fat soaks in, hotter fat colours the crumbs before the centre heats.
- Crumb twice if they are fragileEgg and crumb, then rest the croquettes ten minutes and repeat if the surface looks thin. Any gap in the coating is where the hot sauce escapes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of meat and mushrooms will make roughly eight to ten croquettes, serving about four as an entree in the older sense -- a small course between fish and roast -- or two or three as a modern main with a salad.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the genteel late-Victorian table: a way to turn the remains of a boiled fowl into something that arrived at table looking deliberate. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique — meat suspended in a stiff béchamel, chilled, breaded and fried — came into American cookbooks through French professional practice and was thoroughly domesticated by the cooking-school movement. Fannie Farmer's habit of writing variations as a single line, as here, reflects how the Boston Cooking-School taught: learn one reliable base preparation, then ring changes on it with whatever the larder holds. Mushrooms were a fashionable luxury in the 1890s, cultivated commercially in cellars and caves and increasingly available canned, which is why they turn up so often in these entrée chapters as a way of dressing up cold poultry.