No. 877

Chicken Croquettes, Exquisite

Croquettes de Volaille Exquises

Place two ounces of butter in a saucepan with two ounces of rice flour, stir well and let it cook slowly until slightly brown, then moisten with a quart of veal blond stock (No. 423), and stir continuously till it comes to a boil; set it on one side to boil slowly, and despumate; reduce the sauce and thicken it with egg-yolks, cream and fresh butter. Now add to this sauce, a pound of the white meat taken from a fat pullet, and cut into three-sixteenths of an inch squares, half a pound of cooked mushrooms, four ounces of artichoke bottoms, all being cut the same size as the pullet, and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg; then pour it out, and let it get perfectly cold. Pound in a mortar, one ounce of truffles with one ounce of cooked rice, and three tablespoonfuls of bechamel (No. 409), press it through a sieve, and let get cold, then divide this into half inch balls. Make some balls, an inch and a half in diameter, of the chicken croquette preparation, and in the center of each insert a truffle ball, flatten them to three-quarters of an inch; dip them in beaten eggs and bread-crumbs, fry nicely and dress them in pyramids over a folded napkin, garnishing the top with fried parsley.

← No. 876 Croquettes of Capon a la Royal Hot Side Dishes No. 878 Chicken Croquettes, Hungarian →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic croquette in the French service style: a very stiff cream sauce bound with meat and cut vegetables, chilled solid, shaped around a truffle centre, breaded and fried. Ranhofer assumes a professional larder, but the whole thing can be built from a roast chicken and a few jars.

The hinge: reduce and chill hardA quart of stock thickened with only two ounces each of butter and rice flour will not set on its own; the sauce must be reduced until a spoon drawn through it leaves a clean track, then enriched with yolks, cream and butter. Spread the finished mixture no more than an inch deep and refrigerate several hours or overnight. A soft, warm paste cannot be rolled, and croquettes that are not cold to the centre split open in the fat.
"Despumate"Simply to skim. Hold the sauce at a bare simmer to one side of the heat so the scum and fat collect at the cooler edge, and lift them off repeatedly. It is the nineteenth-century way of getting a clean, glossy sauce without a blender or a fine strainer.
Veal blond stockNo. 423 is a pale veal stock, lighter in colour than a brown stock and gelatinous. A good unsalted chicken stock, reduced a little for body, is the practical stand-in; avoid a dark brown stock, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
Yolks and creamTemper the yolk, cream and butter liaison into the reduced sauce off the heat and do not let it boil afterwards, or the yolks will curdle into grains. Two to three yolks and a few tablespoons of cream are ample for this quantity.
A fat pulletA pullet is a young hen, prized then for tender, well-fleshed breast. Take a pound of cooked white meat from a 4-5 lb roasted chicken. The dice matters: three-sixteenths of an inch is a scant quarter-inch, and everything, chicken, mushrooms and artichoke, is cut to match so the mixture holds together and slices cleanly.
Artichoke bottoms and trufflesArtichoke bottoms come in jars or cans; drain and pat them dry before dicing. For the centres, jarred or frozen truffle can be pounded with the rice and béchamel as directed, or use a little truffle paste; if truffle is out of reach, a firm duxelles of finely chopped mushroom bound with thick béchamel gives the same dark, moist core.
Béchamel No. 409A plain white sauce of milk thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, cooked long enough to lose any raw flour taste. Three tablespoons is only a binder for the truffle paste, so make it thick.
FryingFry at 350-360F, a few at a time, until deep gold, three to four minutes. Hotter and the crust colours before the centre warms; cooler and the breading absorbs fat. Bread them twice, egg and crumb and egg and crumb again, for a shell that reliably survives the fryer.
Fried parsleyParsley must be washed well in advance and completely dry, or it will spit violently in hot fat. Fry sprigs for a few seconds only, until crisp and still green, and drain on paper.
YieldThe quantities given make considerably more than a dozen croquettes at an inch and a half; scale down if cooking for a small table. The napkin-lined pyramid is period presentation; a folded linen napkin on the platter absorbs frying oil as well as looking correct.

A Little History

This is entry 877 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote after some three decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and it shows how such a book worked: the recipe is a set of cross-references, sending the cook to No. 423 for stock and No. 409 for béchamel, because a Delmonico kitchen had those things standing ready. Croquettes were a cornerstone of the era's hot side dishes, a genteel and thoroughly French way of turning cooked poultry into something new, and "exquises" here may well signal the refinement of the surprise truffle centre rather than any particular region or occasion, though that is a matter of interpretation. The rice flour in the roux and the pounded rice in the truffle paste are worth noticing: rice flour is often said to have been valued for making a smooth, pale, slightly less gluey binding than wheat, and it seems to turn up in the book where whiteness and delicacy were the goal. That the recipe sits between croquettes of capon and Hungarian chicken croquettes tells you the rest, that a nineteenth-century American luxury restaurant was expected to offer the same idea a dozen ways over.