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Chicken Croquettes
Marion Harland.
Minced chicken; about one-quarter as much fine bread crumbs as you have of meat; one egg beaten light to each cup of meat; gravy enough to moisten the crumbs and chicken; or, if you have no gravy, a little drawn butter; pepper and salt and chopped parsley to taste; yolks of two hard boiled eggs rubbed fine with the back of a silver spoon, added to the meat; mix up into a paste with as little handling as may be; nor must the paste be too wet to mould readily; make with floured hands into rolls or ovate balls, roll in flour until well coated, and fry a few at a time, lest crowding should injure the shape, in nice dripping, or a mixture half lard and half butter. As you take them out lay in a hot colander, that every drop of fat may be drained off. Serve in a heated dish with cresses or parsley.
A flour-coated croquette rather than the breadcrumbed kind, built from cooked chicken you already have. The whole thing hinges on the paste being stiff enough to hold a shape.
- Get the moisture rightHarland's warning that "nor must the paste be too wet to mould readily" is the make-or-break instruction. Add the gravy a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds together, then chill it for an hour before shaping; cold paste keeps its form in the fat and warm paste bursts.
- The proportions in modern termsFor 2 cups (about 10 oz) minced cooked chicken you want roughly 1/2 cup fine soft bread crumbs, 2 beaten eggs, and 1/4 to 1/3 cup gravy. That yields about 12 croquettes, enough for four as a main course with a vegetable.
- Drawn butterIn nineteenth-century American usage this is not clarified butter but a simple white sauce: about 1 tablespoon butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour and thinned with 1/2 cup hot water or stock. It stands in for gravy as the binder.
- Why a silver spoonThe usual explanation is that hard-boiled yolks pressed with base metal could pick up a metallic taste. Any modern stainless spoon, or a sieve, does the job without consequence.
- Frying fat and temperature"Nice dripping" means clean, fresh-smelling rendered beef or pork fat; half lard and half butter is the alternative, though butter browns fast. Bring the fat to 350-360F and fry in small batches, as she says, so the temperature does not crash and the shapes hold.
- Flour only, no crumb coatThese are rolled in flour rather than egg-and-crumb, so the crust is thin and the surface must be dry. Roll each one just before it goes into the pan and shake off the excess or the loose flour will burn in the fat.
- DrainingThe hot colander works, and is better than a plate; a wire rack set over a tray is the same idea. Do not drain them on paper, which traps steam against the crust and softens it.
- SeasoningCooked chicken and gravy are bland, and the original leaves the amounts to taste. Season the paste firmly before shaping and taste a small pinch fried on its own to check.
The attribution is to Marion Harland, the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, whose Common Sense in the Household (1871) was one of the best-selling American cookbooks of its century; the recipe text itself carries no imprint, so any placing of the page in a particular collection is an assumption. Croquettes belong to the frugal end of Victorian cookery: a way of making Monday's roast fowl into a dish that could be sent to table looking deliberate, bound with the gravy left in the dish and the yolks of eggs whose whites had gone elsewhere. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the fashion for them in English-speaking households ran alongside the general mid-century enthusiasm for French kitchen vocabulary. The garnish of cress or parsley and the insistence on a heated dish are of a piece with Harland's constant theme, that plain food deserves careful presentation.