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Chicken Cutlets
For eighteen cutlets. One full pint of cold chicken chopped rather coarsely; one cup of sweet cream; three tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one of salt; four even ones of mushrooms chopped fine; four eggs; one pint of sifted bread crumbs; one-half teaspoon of pepper; one-half teaspoon onion juice; one tablespoon of lemon juice; one teaspoon chopped parsley. Mix the chicken, mushrooms, salt, pepper, parsley and onion and lemon juice. Pour the cream into a large frying-pan and when it begins to boil stir into it the flour and butter smoothly beaten together. Stir constantly until the mixture boils again; next add the chicken and cook for three minutes. Stir into the boiling mass two of the eggs beaten until light. Take from the fire immediately and pour the contents of the pan into a flat dish and set it 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 a mold or with a knife and sprinkle both sides of each with crumbs. Beat the other two eggs in a deep plate. Dip the cutlets in the egg, then in crumbs, put them in a frying basket, not crowding them and cook in boiling fat for two minutes. Serve with béchamel or mushroom sauce.
A chicken croquette mixture in cutlet form, bound with a thick cream sauce and egg rather than breadcrumbs. Everything hinges on the chilling step.
- Chill hard, and longer than an hourThe mixture must be genuinely cold and firm before shaping, or the cutlets will burst in the fat. Spread it no more than an inch deep in a flat dish and refrigerate at least three hours, or overnight; an hour in a modern refrigerator is not enough for a warm pan's worth.
- A pint of chickenThis is a volume measure of the chopped meat, about 2 cups, which is roughly 3/4 to 1 lb of cooked chicken off the bone. The thigh and leg meat holds moisture better than breast.
- Sweet creamUnsweetened fresh cream, as opposed to the soured cream common in period kitchens. Use heavy or whipping cream; the fat is what keeps the panade from turning pasty.
- "Four even ones of mushrooms"The measure carries over from the preceding tablespoon, so this reads as four level tablespoons of finely chopped mushrooms, an ounce or so of fresh caps. The original is genuinely elliptical here.
- The saltA full tablespoon for this quantity is heavy by current taste. Start with a teaspoon and correct the cooked mixture before chilling.
- Sifted bread crumbsFine dry crumbs, sifted to an even grade so the coating does not go patchy. Panko is too coarse for the light shell intended here.
- Boiling fatThe recipe gives no temperature; deep fat for croquette work of this kind is generally taken to be somewhere around 375F. Two minutes is enough because the filling is already cooked through; the frying only sets the crust and warms the centre. Longer and the cream binding softens and pushes out at the seams.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth. It gives onion flavour without any texture in a smooth mixture.
- YieldEighteen small cutlets, which serves six as a main course with sauce and a vegetable, or nine as a first course. Béchamel or a mushroom cream sauce is not optional garnish; the cutlets are meant to be eaten wet.
Chicken cutlets of this kind are croquettes by another name: a stiff cream binding, minced cooked meat, a crumb shell and deep fat. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, and croquette cookery suited its readers precisely because it turned yesterday's roast fowl into something that looked like a course from a hotel menu. The cutlet shape, flattened and sometimes finished with a paper frill or a bit of macaroni standing in for the bone, was a deliberate imitation of a veal or lamb chop, a piece of table theatre that ran through Anglo-American cooking for decades. Naming the sauce in the last line is characteristic of the period's cookery writing, where the sauce was regarded as part of the dish rather than an addition to it.