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Chicken
CROQUETTES (COOKED FOWL)
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon celery salt
½ cup flour
1 teaspoon lemon-juice
1 cup milk
Few drops onion-juice
1¾ cups cooked fowl
1 teaspoon chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
Egg and crums
Make a white sauce with the fat, flour and milk. Add fowl, seasoned with celery salt, lemon-juice, onion-juice, parsley, and salt and pepper. Cool, shape, dip in flour or fine crums, egg and crums, and fry in deep fat. White meat of fowl absorbs more sauce than dark meat.
A standard croquette formula: a very stiff white sauce used as binder for minced cooked poultry. The proportions are sound, but the original assumes you know two things it never says — how cold the mixture must be, and how hot the fat.
- Chill it hard, and chill it twiceThis is the hinge. Spread the mixture in a shallow pan, cover, and refrigerate several hours or overnight until it is firm enough to cut. Shape, then chill the shaped croquettes again after breading; a warm centre will burst the crust in the fat.
- The sauce is a panada, not a pouring sauceTwo tablespoons butter to half a cup flour to one cup milk is far thicker than a table white sauce — it will be nearly a paste. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding milk, then stir over heat until it pulls away from the pan.
- "Crums"Simply crumbs. "Fine crums" means dry breadcrumbs sieved small, not the coarse fresh crumbs sold today; panko is too open and shaggy for the smooth shell intended here.
- Egg and crumsThe sequence is flour or fine crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water or milk, then crumbs again. Two coats of crumb are what keeps deep fat out of the filling.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe never says how hot the fat should be. Use 375F: lower and the croquettes soak, higher and the crust colours before the centre is hot. Fry a few at a time so the fat does not drop below 350F.
- Onion-juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. It gives flavour without pieces that would break the surface of the croquette.
- QuantitiesOne and three-quarter cups of cooked fowl is somewhere between half and three-quarters of a pound depending on how finely it is chopped or ground — roughly the meat from half a small chicken.
- YieldPerhaps eight to ten cone or cylinder croquettes, serving four. Drain on paper and serve at once; they do not hold well.
- The note about white meatIt is practical advice, not trivia. Breast meat is drier and drinks up sauce, so an all-white-meat mixture may need a little extra milk or it will crumble when shaped.
Croquettes belong to the great American age of the made-over dish, and this chapter's title says as much: yesterday's roast fowl reappears at today's table in a form that looks deliberate rather than thrifty. The technique is French — a *croquette* from *croquer*, to crunch, bound with a thick béchamel-style panada — and it is generally said to have reached English and American cookbooks through the professional kitchen before settling into domestic manuals. By the time Butterick, a pattern company that had branched into household publishing, issued its recipe book in the early twentieth century, croquettes were a fixture of luncheon menus and cooking-school curricula; Fannie Farmer and her Boston contemporaries drilled the same flour-and-milk binder into a generation of cooks. The celery salt, lemon-juice and onion-juice read as characteristic seasonings for pale meat in this sort of book: sharp, aromatic, and requiring nothing that would not already be in the store cupboard.