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Chicken Fritters
Take a cold roasted chicken and mince the white meat fine. Beat four eggs with half a pint of milk and one pint of cream, and then stir in sufficient ground rice to make a thin batter. Put the minced chicken in the batter with two tablespoonfuls of finely-shredded candied lemon peel, the grated peel of one fresh lemon, and sweeten to taste with caster-sugar. Then turn into a saucepan and stir over the fire with a wooden spoon. Leave the mixture until cool when cooked, then roll it out, and cut it into small rounds. Put a lump of butter into a fryingpan and make it hot; then put in the fritters and fry them until lightly browned. Drain them, lay on a folded napkin, sift powdered sugar over, and serve.
A sweet chicken fritter reads oddly now, but the method is sound: a thick rice-flour panade bound with cooked chicken, chilled until sliceable, then fried. A few things need translating.
- The hinge: cook it thick"Thin batter" describes the mixture going into the pan, not coming out. Stir over medium-low heat until it pulls away from the sides in a solid mass, like choux paste or a very stiff pastry cream. If it is still soft when cool, it cannot be rolled or cut and the whole thing will collapse in the butter.
- Ground riceMilled rice, coarser than modern rice flour but not the whole grains sold as rice pudding rice; either the coarse or the fine milling will work. The recipe gives no quantity, only "sufficient": add it gradually and keep going, since the rice swells over several minutes of cooking and this much liquid will take a great deal before it stiffens.
- Pints and gillsPints -- Read as US measures, half a pint of milk is 1 cup and a pint of cream is 2 cups. Read as imperial, a pint runs 20 fl oz and the batter will be looser.
- Quantity of chickenNo amount is given. The white meat of one roast bird, minced fine, comes to roughly 2 cups and balances this much batter. Much more and the paste will not hold together when cut.
- Chilling before cutting"Leave the mixture until cool" understates it. Spread the cooked paste about half an inch thick on a buttered tray, press plastic wrap to the surface, and refrigerate until fully firm — several hours or overnight. Then stamp out rounds with a cutter rather than rolling with a pin.
- Candied lemon peel and caster sugarCandied peel is still sold whole or diced; shred it fine so it does not tear the paste. Caster sugar is superfine sugar — ordinary granulated dissolves adequately here. The recipe says only "sweeten to taste", and since it is finished with sifted sugar it was clearly meant to eat sweet; how far you go is preference.
- Frying in butterWhole butter browns and burns before the fritters color evenly. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, at moderate heat — the interior is already cooked, so you are only after a light crust.
- Yield and servingAbout 20 to 24 small rounds, enough for six as a light dish. The folded napkin is a period plating convention for absorbing frying fat; paper towels on a warm plate do the same work.
Sweetened chicken sounds like a Victorian eccentricity, but it is one of the last survivals of a much older European tradition. Medieval and Tudor cooks built dishes such as blancmange from exactly these components — pounded capon or chicken breast, rice, milk or almond milk, and sugar — and treated the pairing as unremarkable; the strict modern division between sweet and savory hardened only gradually through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, compiled his book in the 1890s, such preparations had become rare, and this one looks like a respectable way to use cold roast fowl — plausibly, though we can only guess, leftovers from a large hotel kitchen given a lemon-and-sugar finish and sent out looking like a dessert.