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Lincoln Croquettes
Mix one cup each bread crumbs, walnut meats cut in pieces, and cold cooked chicken cut in cubes. Moisten with a sauce made by melting one and one-half tablespoons butter, adding one and one-half tablespoons flour, and pouring on gradually, while stirring constantly, one-half cup chicken stock. Season with salt, celery salt, paprika, nutmeg, and Sherry wine. Shape in balls, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Serve with a sauce made of one-half chicken stock and one-half cream and flavored with Sherry wine.
Cutlets of Sweetbreads à la Victoria 2 pairs parboiled sweetbreads 2 teaspoons lemon juice 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Slight grating nutmeg 1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley 1 egg 1 cup Thick White Sauce Chop the sweetbreads, of which there should be two cups; if not enough, add chopped mushrooms to make two cups, then season. Add egg, slightly beaten, to sauce, and combine mixtures. Cool, shape, crumb, and fry. Make a cut in small end of each cutlet, and insert in each a piece of cold boiled macaroni one and one-half inches long. Serve with Allemande Sauce.
Two recipes have run together in this page's text: the croquettes proper, and a second entree of sweetbread cutlets that begins at "Cutlets of Sweetbreads a la Victoria." Both are classic bound-and-fried croquette work, and both depend on the same technique.
- Chill before shapingThe hinge of any croquette is a thoroughly cold mixture. Spread it in a shallow pan, refrigerate at least two hours or overnight, and the balls will hold; shaped warm, they burst in the fat and the filling leaks out.
- Frying temperature"Deep fat" is all the recipe says; period practice was to judge by how fast a cube of bread browned, which corresponds to somewhere around 375F. Much below that the crumb coat soaks; much above, the outside colors before the inside heats through. Fry a few at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- The crumbing order"Dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs" is deliberate, not a misprint. A first light dusting gives the beaten egg something to grip; skipping it leaves bare patches that blow open.
- Bread crumbs, two kindsThe recipe does not distinguish, but soft fresh crumbs from the interior of a loaf suit the body of the mixture and dry fine crumbs suit the coating. Panko is coarser and can color unevenly, so watch it in the fat.
- Brown paperDraining on brown paper meant unprinted grocery bag stock. Paper towels or a wire rack over a sheet pan do the same job; a rack keeps the underside crisp.
- Thick White SauceThe book's Thick White Sauce is a stiffer binding sauce than the one used in the croquettes above, which works out to about 3 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of liquid; check the book's own proportions before mixing it.
- Sweetbreads"Parboiled" in this book means soaked in cold water, then simmered about twenty minutes in acidulated water, plunged into cold water, and stripped of membrane and tubes. Two pairs of veal sweetbreads is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb raw. Order them ahead; they are not a stock item.
- The macaroniThe piece of boiled macaroni in the small end appears to stand in for the protruding bone of a real cutlet. Either way it is decoration, and the cutlets taste the same without it.
- Allemande SauceA veal or chicken veloute finished with egg yolk and lemon. Any modern veloute enriched with a yolk liaison off the heat serves; do not let it boil after the yolk goes in.
- YieldThe croquette mixture makes about a dozen balls, serving four as an entree. The sweetbread cutlets, at two cups of meat, serve four to six.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American entree course around 1900, the elegant solution to yesterday's roast chicken, and Fannie Farmer's book gives page after page of them - lobster, rice, hominy, sweetbread. The name here is sometimes said to honor Mary J. Lincoln, the Boston Cooking School's first principal and author of the Boston Cook Book of 1884, the volume Farmer's own book effectively succeeded, though the book itself does not say whom the name commemorates; dishes named for teachers, patrons and prominent hostesses were a common courtesy in cooking-school literature. The walnut-and-chicken combination points to the period's fondness for nuts in savory dishes, and the whole thing is a study in what a good white sauce could accomplish: a cup of leftover meat, stretched with crumbs and bound with a few tablespoons of roux, becomes a dozen hot fried croquettes with a sherried cream sauce over them. Sweetbreads, meanwhile, were then a genuine delicacy of the fashionable table rather than an oddity - the "a la Victoria" tag, like a la reine or a la king, is menu-French of no fixed meaning beyond signalling that the dish is dressed up.