No. 663

Dolphettes of Chicken Garnishing

Garniture de Dolphettes de Poulet

Brown two shallots in two ounces of butter; add one pound of cooked white chicken meat cut in one-eight inch squares, and four ounces of ham cut the same; season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and cover the whole with a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414), and a gill of tomato sauce (No. 549). Let the whole boil up once, then remove it, and set it aside to get cold, and with this preparation make crescent shaped croquettes; dip them in beaten eggs, and bread-crumbs, and fry them nicely.

← No. 662 Demidoff Garnishing Garnishings No. 664 Dolphettes of Tenderloins of Beef Garnishing →

For the Modern Kitchen

A garnish croquette from Ranhofer's Delmonico's repertoire: diced chicken and ham bound in a rich brown sauce, chilled solid, shaped, breaded and fried. The whole thing hinges on the mixture setting firm.

The hinge: it must be cold and stiffThe mixture has to chill until it can be cut and handled like putty, several hours or overnight in the refrigerator. A soft mix will burst in the fryer and there is no rescuing it once the crust cracks.
Espagnole sauceRanhofer's No. 414 is his brown sauce, made in the classic way from a browned roux and stock with long reduction; consult the original entry for his exact method. A pint is two cups. A well-reduced modern demi-glace, thick enough to coat a spoon heavily, does the same job; thin gravy will not bind.
A gillHalf a cup of tomato sauce, here meaning Ranhofer's cooked, sieved and seasoned sauce rather than anything from a jar.
Proportions to expectA pound of chicken and four ounces of ham against two and a half cups of sauce is a wet mixture by croquette standards. If after chilling it still slumps, reduce the sauce further before combining, or the shaping will fight you.
FryingDeep fat at 350-375F, in small batches. The filling is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust and warming the centre: two to three minutes.
BreadingFlour, then egg, then crumbs gives a far more reliable seal than the egg-and-crumb of the original. Chill the breaded crescents again before frying.
The hamAn eighth-inch dice of a dry-cured or lightly smoked cooked ham. Wet-brined supermarket ham will weep into the mixture and slacken it.
Yield and useExpect roughly two dozen small crescents. These are a garnish, not a course, arranged around a roast or a braise; two or three per plate.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its garnishing chapter is essentially a parts catalogue: dozens of small fried, moulded and glazed items to be ranged around a central dish. The name is a puzzle in the book's own French-American idiom; one plausible guess is that it is a francified spelling of the Italian polpette, small meat patties, though Ranhofer offers no gloss. He gives the same treatment to beef tenderloin in the very next entry, which suggests the word described a shape and method rather than a specific meat. The technique is croquette logic applied to leftovers of the highest order: cooked white chicken and ham, bound with the kitchen's standing brown sauce, chilled, cut and fried. In a restaurant running espagnole and tomato sauce continuously, one imagines a garnish like this cost little beyond the frying.