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Chicken Croquettes II
Clean and dress a four-pound fowl. Put into a kettle with six cups boiling water, seven slices carrot, two slices turnip, one small onion, one stalk celery, one bay leaf, and three sprigs thyme. Cook slowly until fowl is tender. Remove fowl; strain liquor, cool, and skim off fat. Make a thick sauce, using one-fourth cup butter, one-half cup flour, one cup chicken stock, and one-third cup cream. Remove meat from chicken, chop, and moisten with sauce. Season with salt, cayenne, and slight grating of nutmeg; then add one beaten egg, cool, shape, crumb, and fry same as other croquettes. Arrange around a mound of green peas, and serve with Cream Sauce or Wine Jelly.
A two-stage recipe: poach a whole fowl for stock and meat, then bind the meat in a very thick béchamel. The binding sauce is the hinge.
- Make the sauce thick enoughHalf a cup of flour to one cup stock plus a third cup cream is deliberately stiff — a panade, not a pouring sauce. If it is loose the croquettes will burst in the fat. Cook it until it pulls away from the pan in a mass.
- Chill before shaping"Cool" means thoroughly cold, ideally two hours or overnight in the refrigerator. Warm mixture cannot be rolled and will not hold crumbs.
- A four-pound fowlA "fowl" is a mature laying hen, tougher and more flavourful than a broiler. A 4–5 lb roasting chicken substitutes but will be tender in about 1 to 1¼ hours rather than the 2 to 3 hours an old bird needs. Simmer, never boil.
- Turnip and celery"One stalk celery" here most likely means a single rib, and "slices turnip" most likely means white turnip rather than rutabaga; the recipe does not specify either.
- Crumbing"Crumb" is the standard coating used throughout the book: crumbs, beaten egg diluted with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again. Resting the coated croquettes a little before frying helps the crust set.
- Frying temperature"Fry same as other croquettes" means deep fat, judged by the bread-cube test rather than a thermometer: roughly forty seconds to brown for uncooked mixtures, and a shorter time — hotter fat — for cooked mixtures such as these. No Fahrenheit figure appears in the recipe. Cooler fat soaks; hotter fat colours before the centre warms through.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a four-pound fowl would plausibly make around a dozen croquettes. The peas-in-the-centre arrangement and the choice of cream sauce or wine jelly are period plating; either sauce works, the jelly reading as a tart counterpoint.
- Use the rest of the stockOnly one cup of the six goes into the sauce. Reduce and keep the remainder — it is the by-product that made this dish economical in the first place.
Croquettes were a fixture of American entrée cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, and Fannie Farmer's book gives more than a dozen versions — chicken, veal, sweetbread, rice, hominy, lobster. They belong to a school-taught, thrift-minded style of cooking: a boiled fowl gave stock for the sauce, meat for the croquettes, and fat skimmed from the liquor, with nothing discarded. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique — cold thick sauce bound with egg, crumbed and deep-fried — came into American kitchens through French professional cooking, then was systematised by the cooking-school movement into the flour-to-liquid ratios seen here. That this is "Chicken Croquettes II" simply distinguishes it from another recipe of the same name in the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, and the deliberate arrangement around a mound of peas reflects the era's expectation that an entrée arrive at the table composed rather than simply plated.