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Chicken Cutlets
Take a cold boiled chicken, chop it into dice, and put it into a stewpan to cook with half its bulk of raw truffles, also cut into dice, four tablespoonfuls of quenelle forcemeat, and two tablespoonfuls of reduced veloute sauce. Divide this mixture into eight equal parts, and roll them on a well floured board, making them into the shape of cutlets, and sticking a small bone in the thin end. Dip them one by one first into beaten egg and then into breadcrumbs, taking care that the crumbs are equally distributed over them; plunge them into a fryingpan with butter, and fry until colored. Take them out, drain on a cloth, put a paper frill on each bone, and arrange them in a circle on a dish with a mince of vegetables in the center.
This is a croquette in cutlet clothing: cooked chicken bound with forcemeat and reduced sauce, shaped, crumbed and fried. The instructions assume a brigade kitchen where forcemeat and veloute are already standing by.
- The hinge: the mixture must be cold and stiffThe recipe says to heat the diced chicken with the truffle, forcemeat and sauce, but says nothing about cooling it. Spread it on a tray and chill it thoroughly, at least two hours, or it will not roll into cutlets and will burst in the fat.
- Quenelle forcemeatRaw chicken or veal pounded to a smooth paste; period versions are variously bound with a panada and eggs or, in the lighter mousseline style, with egg white and cream. Either can be made in a food processor; you need only the four tablespoonfuls specified, so scale accordingly. It is the binder here, and being raw it also needs cooking through, so the mixture must be simmered gently until the forcemeat is set before shaping.
- Reduced velouteWhite stock thickened with a blond roux and boiled down until it coats a spoon heavily. Two tablespoons is a small amount doing precise work: it should be nearly as thick as a paste when cold. A thin sauce gives a mixture that will not hold.
- TrufflesRaw black truffle at half the bulk of the chicken is an extravagance almost no domestic cook will match. Preserved truffle peelings, or a much smaller quantity of fresh truffle, will read correctly; sauteed mushroom duxelles gives colour and savour if not perfume.
- The bone and the frillThe small bone is decorative, giving the croquette the silhouette of a rib chop — a trimmed wing bone or a short piece of rib is traditional. The paper frill, or papillote, was standard restaurant dress in 1896; skip it if it strikes you as fussy, but the bone is what makes the shape legible.
- Frying"Plunge them into a fryingpan with butter" means shallow frying in clarified butter, which will not burn at the temperature needed. Whole butter browns before the crumbs colour. Fry around 350F, turning once, three to four minutes total; everything inside is already cooked.
- CrumbsDry, fine white crumbs, not coarse panko, are what gives the smooth even shell the recipe insists on. A double coat — egg, crumb, egg, crumb — is insurance against splitting.
- A mince of vegetablesA macedoine: peas, carrot, turnip and green beans cut small, cooked separately, bound with a little butter or cream sauce and piled in the centre of the ring.
- YieldEight cutlets from one boiled chicken, so four servings as a main course or eight as an entree in the older sense of a course between fish and roast.
Cotelettes de volaille of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire, where a cold roast or boiled bird was routinely rebuilt into something that looked freshly made — the cutlet shape, the bone, the paper frill all signal a dish with more standing than leftovers. Oscar Tschirky, who was never a cook by trade but ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and compiled this book in 1896, is recording the hotel kitchen's French practice, and the recipe reads as written for someone who already has quenelle forcemeat and reduced veloute on the stove. The word cutlet here is pure convention: the same trick produced veal cutlets, lobster cutlets and salmon cutlets in the same period, all of them croquettes moulded to imitate a chop.