Home › Entrees › Cigarettes à la Prince Henry
Cigarettes à la Prince Henry
Roll puff paste very thin, and spread with Chicken Forcemeat. Roll like a jelly roll, and cut in pieces four inches long and a little larger round than a cigarette. Brush over with egg, roll in crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Arrange log-cabin fashion on a folded doily, and serve while hot.
A croquette in disguise: puff paste rolled around chicken forcemeat, crumbed and deep-fried. The whole thing turns on temperature control — the paste must set before the fat soaks in, and the forcemeat inside has to reach a safe temperature in the same short fry.
- Chicken forcemeatThe original cross-references a separate recipe. Forcemeat of this type in period books is generally raw chicken pounded or ground fine and worked with a panada or bread crumbs, egg white and cream, then seasoned; the book's own recipe gives the proportions. A modern food processor does in a minute what the book expects of a mortar. Keep everything cold or the mixture breaks.
- Fat temperature"Deep fat" means lard or another rendered fat. The book gives no thermometer reading; the period test is browning a cube of bread, and roughly 360–375°F is the usual modern working range. Too cool and the puff paste absorbs grease before it puffs; too hot and the outside colors while the chicken inside is still raw.
- Cook them throughThese are raw ground poultry in a jacket. At four inches long and cigarette-thin they cook quickly, but check one from the middle of the batch — the forcemeat should read 165°F and be opaque throughout.
- Chill before fryingNot stated in the original. Refrigerate the cut rolls until firm so the layers hold their spiral and the seam does not unwind in the fat.
- Seal the seamEgg wash the edge of the paste before rolling and press it closed, then set the pieces seam down. A gap lets fat into the forcemeat and the cigarette bursts.
- CrumbsPeriod crumbs are dried white bread pushed through a sieve — finer and drier than panko, which gives a spiky coat quite unlike the smooth one intended here. Egg wash, then crumbs, then a brief rest so the coating adheres.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain; a wire rack over a sheet pan works better because the undersides stay crisp. Paper towels are acceptable but will soften the bottom.
Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, made a heavily publicized tour of the United States in 1902, and American hotel and restaurant kitchens named dishes for him with the enthusiasm they usually reserved for opera singers — the practice of borrowing a celebrity's name for a garnish or a shape was standard in the French-derived cookery that Boston's cooking schools taught. The "cigarette" itself is late-Victorian table wit: croquettes and forcemeats were routinely shaped into cutlets, pears, corks and cigars, then stacked or fanned for effect, and the log-cabin arrangement on a folded doily is the kind of plating instruction that appears throughout the entrée chapters of the period. Cigarettes were a fashionable, faintly modern object around 1900, which may well be why a dish would be shaped like one.