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Chicken Croquettes
Season one and three-fourths cup of cold cooked fowl with one-half teaspoon salt, one-fourth teaspoon celery salt, a few grains of cayenne, one teaspoon of lemon juice, a few drops of onion juice, and one teaspoon of finely chopped parsley. Add to one cup of the cream foundation described in Salmon Croquettes and fry as before. White meat of fowl absorbs more sauce than dark meat.
A short recipe that leans on another entry in the book: the "cream foundation" from Salmon Croquettes is a very thick white sauce (a panada) that binds the meat. Everything that determines success happens before the croquettes reach the fat.
- The hinge: chill the mixture hardCroquette paste must be spread on a plate, covered, and refrigerated until firm — two hours at least, overnight is better. Warm, soft paste will burst in the fat no matter how well it is crumbed.
- The cream foundationThe base recipe is not given here; period croquette foundations are roux-thickened sauces made far thicker than a pouring sauce, so that they set firm when cold. Cook the flour through for a couple of minutes so the finished croquette does not taste pasty.
- "Fowl" and its textureFowl in period usage meant a mature stewing hen, cooked long and moist. Poached or roasted chicken thigh works better than breast here; cut the meat into small dice rather than shredding or grinding, or the interior turns to paste.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects; the recipe calls for only a few drops. Grated onion pulp will weep and loosen the mixture.
- Celery saltStill sold, but modern blends vary widely in salt content. Taste the cold meat mixture before adding the half teaspoon of plain salt and adjust.
- "Fry as before"The referred-to method is not reproduced here; the standard period breading is to shape, roll in fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoon of water, then crumbs again, and chill the coated croquettes before frying.
- Fat temperatureDeep fry at 375F for two to three minutes, until deep gold. The filling is already cooked, so the object is only to set the crust; cooler fat soaks in, hotter fat colors before the center warms.
- The last line is practical adviceWhite meat is drier and takes up more sauce than dark, so a mixture of light and dark meat sets more reliably.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, serving four as a course with peas or a light sauce.
Croquettes were a fixture of American middle-class cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, and their logic is economy dressed as elegance: yesterday's boiled fowl, bound in a rich white sauce, crumbed and fried into something that could be sent to table in a shape that looked deliberate. Cookbooks of the period standardized the method into a single "foundation" sauce with interchangeable fillings — salmon, chicken, sweetbread, veal, lobster — which is exactly why this entry can be four sentences long and refer the reader elsewhere. The Butterick Publishing Company came to cookbooks by way of dress patterns and its women's magazines, and the house style shows here: modular, thrifty, assuming a cook who already has cold roast fowl and a saucepan of white sauce in her repertoire. Celery salt and onion juice, both signatures of the era's seasoning, gave flavor without visible bits, which was considered a mark of refinement in a smooth-textured dish.