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Chicken Croquettes, Macedoine
Carefully pick all the meat from a tender fowl boiled early in the morning and cut it into very small square pieces. Cut the same way one ounce cooked ham and twelve canned mushrooms. Have one table-spoon freshly chopped shallots in a saucepan with one ounce butter and fry for three minutes, stirring well meanwhile; add two ounces flour, mix till well thickened without browning, then dilute this with a pint white broth. Season with one teaspoon salt, two salt-spoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; stir and let boil for fifteen minutes. Add three egg yolks, stir well, then add the chicken, ham and mushrooms, also half gill sherry. Mix well and cook for five minutes. Remove from the fire, place the preparation on a dish and let cool off. Dredge three tablespoons flour on a corner of a table. Divide the force meat into six equal parts, roll up to pyramid shape on the flour, dip each one in beaten-up egg and gently roll in bread crumbs. Lay in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes. Lift up and thoroughly drain. Pour one gill hot tomato sauce on a hot dish and neatly arrange the croquettes, one overlapping another, crown-like. Fill up the centre with a hot macedoine. Adjust a paper frill at the end of each and serve.
WHITE BROTH (BOUILLON BLANC) Place on the fire in a large saucepan three pounds veal bones and any scraps of same on hand, also any remnants of raw beef or bones, as well as scraps of raw poultry. Pour in five gallons cold water, let come to a boil, then carefully skim off every particle of the scum. Then add four medium, whole, peeled carrots, two small whole, peeled turnips, two peeled onions, one parsley root, three leeks and two stalks celery. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for four hours. Then strain through a cheesecloth into a stone jar and put in a cool place. When thoroughly cooled off place it in the ice box and use as required. When nearly used renew preparation.
A classic panade-bound croquette: the mixture must be cold and stiff before shaping, and everything else is detail.
- Chill the forcemeat properlyThe recipe says only to let it cool off. In practice the mixture needs several hours in the refrigerator, spread no more than an inch deep, until it is firm enough to hold a shape. Warm or soft forcemeat bursts in the fryer and there is no saving it.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup and a gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which makes the seasoning roughly 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg for the whole batch.
- The egg yolksPull the pan off the heat before stirring in the yolks, then return it briefly. At a boil they scramble and the binding breaks into grains. The five minutes of cooking afterward should be the barest simmer.
- Frying time and temperatureThe recipe says only 'boiling fat.' At a steady 350-375F, breadcrumbed croquettes of this kind will usually take rather less than the eight minutes given: fry until deep gold. The filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- MacedoineA macedoine is a mixture of vegetables cut in small even dice, most often carrot, turnip, green beans and peas, cooked separately and tossed together in butter. It is served hot here as the centrepiece the croquettes ring.
- A tender fowlA fowl in this period generally meant an older bird, cooked long and gently. A supermarket chicken of 4 to 5 lb, poached about an hour, will give ample picked meat for this, though a weaker broth.
- The white brothFive gallons is a restaurant batch and the storage instructions belong to an ice box, not a refrigerator. Make a quart or two, refrigerate no more than three or four days, or freeze it. The point of the recipe is that the bones go into cold water unroasted, so the stock stays pale.
- Yield and the frillSix croquettes serves three as a lunch or first course. The paper frill is a decorative cuff of fringed paper wrapped where the croquette narrows; it is pure period presentation and nothing is lost by leaving it off.
Croquettes were one of the great uses of the French professional kitchen's leftovers, and this recipe shows the method at full dress: cooked chicken bound in a very thick veloute enriched with yolks, chilled, shaped, crumbed and fried. Macedoine, for a mixture of small diced vegetables, is generally traced to the idea of Macedonia as a patchwork of peoples, and by the nineteenth century the word was standard French kitchen vocabulary for the cut. That this appears in a book called The International Cook Book, plated crown-like on tomato sauce with paper frills, reflects the era when hotel and restaurant cooking in the French manner was what an ambitious American household aspired to reproduce. The accompanying white broth, kept in a stone jar in the ice box and renewed when nearly used, is a reminder that a working stockpot was assumed equipment rather than a weekend project.