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Chicken Croquettes (II)
Mrs. J. A. Ellis.
Four and one-half pounds chicken boiled and chopped very fine; moisten to a thick pulp with the liquor in which it has been boiled. Mix with this a pint and a half of mashed potatoes, beaten to a cream; three eggs, one teaspoon of mustard, sweet marjoram, salt and pepper to taste; a little celery chopped very fine; soften with milk till very soft, and add a quarter of a pound of butter. Mould into forms, dip in egg and cracker dust, and fry in boiling lard.
A Victorian community-cookbook croquette: boiled fowl and mashed potato bound with egg, shaped, breaded and deep-fried. The proportions are generous and the mixture is deliberately soft, which is where most of the difficulty lies.
- Chill the mixture before shapingThis is the hinge. The recipe tells you to soften with milk "till very soft," which makes a paste that will slump and burst in the fat unless it is thoroughly cold. Spread it in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least three hours, or overnight, then shape and bread it cold.
- Add the milk cautiously"Soften with milk till very soft" has no quantity and depends entirely on how wet your potatoes and chicken liquor are. Start with a few tablespoons; the mass should hold a shape when pressed, not pour.
- A pint and a half of mashed potatoesThree cups by volume, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of potatoes before cooking. Mash them dry and rice them if possible; a wet, gluey mash will make the croquettes collapse.
- The chickenA 4 1/2 lb bird yields around 2 to 2 1/2 lb of picked meat. Simmer it gently in seasoned water until tender -- an hour or more, depending on the bird -- and keep the broth for moistening. "Chopped very fine" means knife-chopped, not pureed — a food processor pulsed briefly gets close, but run too long it turns to paste.
- Sweet marjoramNo quantity given. A teaspoon of dried, or a tablespoon chopped fresh, suits this volume. The teaspoon of mustard is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared, though the recipe does not say.
- Cracker dustFinely crushed plain soda or water crackers. Panko or dry breadcrumbs stand in, though cracker crumbs fry to a paler, sandier crust closer to the original.
- "Boiling lard"Lard does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble briskly around the food, in modern terms somewhere around 350–375°F. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash, three to four minutes to a deep gold. Any neutral frying oil works if lard is not to hand.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly 30 to 36 croquettes — a party dish. It halves easily, though the three eggs will not divide evenly: use one, or two if the mixture seems dry.
Croquettes were a mainstay of nineteenth-century American household cookery precisely because they solved a problem: what to do with the meat left from a boiled fowl. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form arrived in English kitchens through French professional cooking, then spread rapidly once frying in deep fat became routine at home. The Home Cook Book, first published in Chicago in 1874, with later editions following, was compiled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to raise money for charity, a model that produced thousands of community cookbooks over the following decades. The presence of two chicken croquette recipes in one volume is typical of the genre, and presumably reflects contributors submitting their own versions and the editors printing them side by side rather than choosing between them. This one is unusual in leaning so heavily on mashed potato, which stretches the meat further and marks it as a thriftier household's version than the cream-sauce-bound croquettes found in contemporary professional manuals.