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Chicken Croquettes with Flageolets
Carefully pick off all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday and mince it exceedingly fine. Then proceed to prepare the croquettes substituting the following flageolets for the macedoine:
Open a pint can flageolets, drain and plunge in boiling water for five minutes. Drain again, heat a tablespoon butter in a small saucepan and add the flageolets. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper and let slowly cook for five minutes, frequently tossing them meanwhile. Dress the croquettes on a hot dish, pour a gill hot demi-glace around them, place the flageolets at both ends of the dish and serve.
This entry is a variation, written as a note to a fuller croquette recipe elsewhere in the book, and it assumes you already have yesterday's roast bird sitting in the icebox. A few of its measures and its two named French elements need translating.
- Chicken or turkeyThe title says chicken, the text says turkey. In a book built around using up yesterday's roast, either is correct; any cooked poultry, dark meat included, works so long as it is minced very fine and the skin and gristle are discarded.
- The hinge: chill the mixture hardThe croquette base (minced meat bound with a thick, cold sauce, per the fuller recipe this note refers back to) should be spread on a plate and chilled until firm before shaping. Warm or slack mixture bursts in the fat.
- FryingDeep fat, hot but not smoking; on a modern thermometer 365-375F, though this page specifies no temperature and no coating. Two to three minutes, just until the crust colors. Everything inside is already cooked; longer frying only splits the coating.
- A gillHalf a cup. Demi-glace is a reduced brown veal or beef stock; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a reduced homemade brown stock will do, loosened to a coating consistency.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon of white pepper — assertive but in scale with the pint of beans.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green French shell beans, sold dried or canned, though usually as a specialty item rather than a supermarket staple. A pint can is roughly 15-16 oz; two cups of home-cooked dried flageolets substitute directly, and the five-minute plunge in boiling water serves to rinse off the canning liquor and warm them through.
- MacedoineThe garnish this variation replaces: a mix of small-diced carrot, turnip, green beans and peas in butter. Nothing else in the method changes.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, published The International Cook Book in 1906; this page opens mid-thought with the turkey left over from yesterday -- thrift and a French kitchen vocabulary in the same breath. Flageolets are a small immature-picked haricot from northern France, generally traced to a grower named Chevrier in the Bretigny district in the 1870s, and prized because they hold their pale green color and stay tender. Croquettes themselves earned their place in books like this one for the same reason they earned it in restaurant kitchens: they turn cold roast meat into something that can be sent out on a hot dish with a sauce around it.