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Breadcrumbs (For chicken Draw wash and dry)
For chicken. Draw, wash and dry chicken, then cut into neat joints, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat Crisco in frying pan, add clove of garlic and pepper cut in small pieces. When garlic turns brown take out, put chicken in, fry till brown, then cover closely, allow to simmer till ready. A short time before covering chicken, add tomatoes peeled and cut in small pieces.
For croquettes. Drain liquor from can of corn, or grate ears, and chop kernels fine. Blend Crisco and flour together in pan over fire, add milk, stir till boiling and cook five minutes, stirring all the time, add seasonings, and corn, and cook five minutes, then allow to cool. When cold, form lightly with floured hands into neat croquettes, brush over with beaten egg, toss in crumbs and fry in hot Crisco to a golden brown. Drain. Place chicken on hot platter, garnish with croquettes and serve hot.
Two dishes served as one plate: a skillet chicken braised with tomato, and sweet corn croquettes used as garnish. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a method and scale it yourself.
- "Draw" the chickenDrawing means removing the entrails from a freshly killed bird. Any supermarket chicken is already drawn; buy a 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird and cut it into eight or ten joints, or use bone-in thighs and drumsticks.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated over the years and no longer the same hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the book was promoting. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; about 3 tablespoons for the chicken, and enough for shallow frying the croquettes.
- "Pepper cut in small pieces"This means a fresh pepper, not ground pepper from the tin, since it is chopped and fried alongside the garlic. A green bell pepper is the likeliest reading for a 1913 American book.
- The garlic stepThe clove is browned in the fat and then discarded, a way of perfuming the oil rather than seasoning the dish. Pull it out as soon as it colours; garlic burns fast and turns bitter, which will follow through into the whole braise.
- Timing the chickenBrown the joints uncovered over medium-high heat, then add the tomatoes, cover, and simmer 25 to 35 minutes for dark meat. "Till ready" means 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, without touching the bone.
- Croquette base proportionsThe recipe omits them. A workable panada is 3 tablespoons fat, 1/3 cup flour and 1 cup milk, cooked thick, then folded into about 2 cups drained corn. It should be stiff enough to hold a shape when cold.
- Chill the mixture properlyThis is the hinge. "Allow to cool" is not enough; the base needs at least two hours in the refrigerator, ideally spread in a shallow pan, or the croquettes burst in the fat. Egg and crumb them, then chill again briefly before frying.
- Frying temperature"Hot Crisco" for croquettes means 365 to 375F. Below that they soak; much above it and the crumbs colour before the centre heats through. Two to three minutes, turning once, gets them golden.
- YieldServes four, with roughly a dozen croquettes if formed to about two inches.
The Story of Crisco was a promotional cookbook written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s, shortly after Crisco itself went on sale in 1911 as one of the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortenings. Its recipes serve to show that the new fat could do what lard and butter did: fry, braise, brown, and take high heat without smoking, which may be why this page pairs a sautéed dish with a deep-fried one. The chicken belongs to a family of turn-of-the-century American skillet dishes flavoured with tomato and sweet pepper and a browned clove of garlic, dishes of a kind often labelled Creole or Spanish, while corn croquettes were a common way of turning canned or leftover vegetables into something that read as a proper garnish. The truncated title is most likely an artefact of indexing rather than anything about the dish.