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Palmettes of Chicken, Celine
Skin and bone fowl saved from yesterday, pick off meat and cut it in small squares, then cut in same shape, but a shade smaller, half that quantity of pork, place both on a plate, add a finely chopped truffle and keep till required. Clip off tails and peel six fresh mushrooms, wash, drain and cut in small squares. Place in enamelled saucepan with three finely chopped shallots, an ounce fresh butter, and gently brown for five minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Add one and a half ounces flour, briskly stir while heating for one minute, then pour in two and a half gills broth and the juice of half a sound lemon, adding half teaspoon chopped parsley. Sharply mix with a whisk until it comes to a boil, let cook for ten minutes, add chicken, pork, truffle, two tablespoons sherry, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, half saltspoon nutmeg, mix well and let gently cook for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Dilute on a plate two egg yolks with a half gill cream, add to force and gently mix while heating for three minutes, remove, transfer force to a bowl, lightly butter surface and let get cold. Divide in twelve equal parts, roll out on a lightly floured table to heart shape, but not too thin, dip in beaten egg, then roll in freshly prepared bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons clarified butter in a frying pan, place croquettes in a pan one beside another and gently fry for five minutes on each side. Dress on a dish crown-like, decorate with a little parsley, and serve with a mousseline sauce separately.
A croquette mixture bound with a flour-and-egg-yolk sauce, shaped into palm-leaf or heart forms and shallow fried. The recipe assumes a cook with leftover roast fowl on hand and a French vocabulary in the head.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe mixture (the "force," meaning forcemeat) must be genuinely cold and firm before shaping, not merely cool. Spread it no more than an inch deep, butter the surface to stop a skin forming, and refrigerate at least four hours or overnight. Warm forcemeat will not hold a shape and will burst in the pan.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two and a half gills of broth is 1¼ cups and half a gill of cream is ¼ cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons cayenne is a full half teaspoon, which is assertive by modern standards, and half a saltspoon of nutmeg is an eighth of a teaspoon.
- The pork should be cookedThe instruction reads as a companion to the leftover fowl, and it is safest treated that way — use cooked pork, ham or a piece of roast loin cut a shade smaller than the chicken. Raw pork cubes get only ten minutes in a thick sauce, which is not a reliable way to bring them through.
- Enamelled saucepan, and whyLemon juice and sherry in a bare cast-iron or unlined aluminium pan will pick up a metallic taste and dull the sauce. Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel does the job.
- The yolk liaisonOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir for the stated three minutes. A boil at this point curdles the yolks and the binding breaks.
- Mushrooms"Clip off tails" means trim the stem ends. Peeling is unnecessary with today's cultivated mushrooms
- TruffleA fresh black truffle is a luxury purchase. A teaspoon of finely chopped preserved truffle, or a few chopped dried porcini soaked and drained, gives the same dark savoury note without pretending to be the same thing.
- Frying and sauceTwo tablespoons of clarified butter in a wide pan is a shallow fry; add more as it is absorbed and keep the heat moderate so the crumbs colour in the five minutes given rather than scorching. Mousseline sauce is hollandaise lightened with whipped cream, made at the last minute.
- YieldTwelve palmettes, which serves four as a main course with a vegetable, or six as a first course.
The International Cook Book came out of the professional French kitchen as it was practised in American hotels and clubs, and this page shows the house style plainly: a leftover roast fowl is not reheated but rebuilt into something with a French name and a personal dedication. Garnish and dish names honouring women — Josephine, Rachel — were common in that tradition; some record a patron, a singer or an actress, though others were later codified as fixed garnishes. Palmette refers to the shape, the stylised palm leaf of classical ornament, and the recipe accordingly calls for a heart form rolled "not too thin" instead of the usual cylinder or cork. The economy underneath is older than the vocabulary: a chopped-meat forcemeat stiffened with a flour sauce, chilled until it can be cut, then crumbed and fried is how a household turned yesterday's bird into today's dinner without admitting to it.