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Chicken Cutlets
2 cups cooked chicken
1 tablespoon lemon-juice
4 tablespoons chopped mush- 2 tablespoons butter or other rooms fat
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon flour
½ teaspoon pepper
1 cup milk or cream
1 teaspoon parsley
4 eggs
½ teaspoon onion-juice
Mix the chicken, mushrooms, salt, pepper, parsley and the onion and lemon-juice. Make a white sauce with the fat, flour and milk or cream. Add the chicken, and cook for three minutes. Stir in two of the eggs beaten until light. Take from the fire immediately, pour into a greased, flat dish and set in a cold place for an hour or so. The colder the mixture becomes, the better it may be handled. Shape into cutlets, either in molds or with a knife, and sprinkle both sides of each cutlet with fine crums. Beat the other two eggs in deep plates. Dip the cutlets in the egg, then in crums, put them in a frying-basket, not crowding them and cook in deep fat for two minutes. Serve with Béchamel or mushroom sauce.
The ingredient list was set in two columns and has scrambled in transcription; read it as 2 cups cooked chicken, 4 tablespoons chopped mushrooms, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon parsley, ½ teaspoon onion-juice, 1 tablespoon lemon-juice, 2 tablespoons butter or other fat, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk or cream, 4 eggs. This is a croquette in cutlet shape, and everything depends on the binding.
- The hinge is the chillThe mixture must be spread thin in the greased dish and refrigerated until genuinely firm, not merely cool. An hour is a minimum; overnight is better, and a warm centre will burst the crumb coating in the fat.
- The sauce is thinner than modern croquette practiceOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a pouring sauce, and the two beaten eggs are doing most of the setting work. Croquette recipes today generally use three to four tablespoons of flour per cup of liquid. If your first tray refuses to hold a shape, that ratio is the reason.
- Chop the chicken fineTwo cups of cooked chicken means well-picked meat cut small, roughly a quarter-inch or finer, or briefly pulsed. Large shreds create fault lines and the cutlets split in the fryer.
- Onion-juiceGrate a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth. Half a teaspoon of grated onion works, but do not substitute onion powder, which reads sweet and dusty here.
- MushroomsSauté the chopped mushrooms first and let them give up their water. Raw mushrooms stirred into the sauce release liquid as the mixture chills and loosen the whole thing.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature at all. About 375F is the usual working heat; two minutes at that heat browns the crumbs and warms a chilled cutlet, but note that the two beaten eggs go in off the fire, so the centre is not reliably cooked through on colour alone.
- Crumbs and the egg wash"Crums" here are fine crumbs, most likely dried rather than the coarse fresh sort. The recipe's first light dusting before egging gives the wash something to grip, and skipping it will tend to leave a coating that slides off in the basket.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the mixture will make roughly eight cutlets, enough for about four as an entree. The book directs Bechamel or mushroom sauce, and the fried surface is dry enough that it is worth making.
"Made-over dishes" was a standing chapter in American household books of the early twentieth century, and it meant exactly what it says: the systematic use of Sunday's roast on Tuesday. The cutlet shape is the tell. There is no cutlet in this recipe in the butcher's sense of the word, no chop and no bone; the mixture is simply pressed into the flattened teardrop of a veal cutlet, sometimes with a bit of macaroni stuck in the narrow end to imitate the bone. That borrowed silhouette let a dish of leftovers and white sauce arrive at the table looking like something bought whole, which was much of the point in a period when the middle-class table was expected to look better than its budget. The technique itself is French, descended from the croquette, and its spread through American cookbooks is often credited to the cooking-school movement of the 1880s and 1890s, which prized any preparation that could be measured, standardised and taught.