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Chicken Croquettes
Boil two fowls weighing five pounds each till very tender, mince fine, add one pint cream, half pound butter, salt and pepper to taste; shape oval in a jelly glass or mold. Fry in lard like doughnuts until brown. - Mrs. E. L. Fay, New York City.
A terse professional-style note rather than a full recipe: it assumes the cook already knows how croquettes behave. Two things are missing that a modern reader will need to supply — a binder, and a coating.
- ScaleTwo five-pound fowls yield roughly four to five pounds of picked meat, enough for thirty or more croquettes. Halve or quarter the whole thing unless you are cooking for a crowd.
- "Fowls" are not broilersA five-pound fowl in this period was a mature laying hen — tough, fat, deeply flavoured, and needing two to three hours of gentle simmering. A supermarket roasting chicken of the same weight is tender in about an hour; a stewing hen, if you can find one, is closer to the original.
- The missing binderAs written, minced meat with cream and butter will not hold a shape when it hits hot fat. Period practice was to bind the mince with a very thick white sauce or a panade and chill it hard. The recipe names no thickener, but the pint of cream and half pound of butter were most likely meant as the basis of such a sauce rather than as additions to loose meat; cook them together with flour to a stiff paste and cool overnight.
- The jelly glassA small straight-sided tumbler used as a mould, not a measure. Pack the chilled mixture in and knock it out to get the uniform oval-cylinder shape croquettes were expected to have.
- Coating"Fry like doughnuts" implies deep fat, but doughnuts have a skin and croquettes do not. Egg-and-crumb them before frying or the surface will disintegrate.
- Fat and temperatureLard fries beautifully and is worth using; any neutral fat works. Hold it at 365–375F. Lower and the croquettes drink fat, higher and the coating browns before the centre warms through — two to three minutes is enough, since everything inside is already cooked.
- SeasoningBoiled fowl and cream are bland. Season the bound mixture assertively while it is still warm, and taste it — salt, pepper, and traditionally a scrape of nutmeg or a little of the reduced cooking broth.
Croquettes were the respectable Victorian answer to cooked fowl: chopped meat, a stiff cream sauce, a crumb coat and a bath of hot fat turned plain poultry into something fit to send to table with a napkin under it. They appear all through late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, usually in the poultry chapter and usually contributed by a named lady, as here — The Dixie Cook-Book, like its Northern cousins, descends from the Buckeye compilations and carries named contributions, and the instructions read like one cook's shorthand to another rather than a tested procedure. The New York attribution is worth noting too: despite the title, the book drew freely on a national network of contributors, and croquettes were a French-derived, city-kitchen dish that signalled a certain refinement wherever it appeared.