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July 10
Menu: Clam Broth; Chicken Croquettes; Peas; Buttered Rolls; Mayonnaise of Lettuce and Tomatoes; Tutti Fruitti Ice Cream; Macaroons; Coffee Chicken Croquettes-2 cups cooked chicken, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon celery salt, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon onion juice, and 1 cup white sauce. Mix ingredients in order given. Cool mixture, shape, crumb and fry in hot Crisco. The white sauce is made as follows: 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk (heated), salt and pepper to taste. Melt Crisco, add flour, then add milk gradually. Cook over fire until smooth and thick. Add seasoning.
A classic leftover-chicken croquette bound with a very stiff white sauce. The recipe is sound, but two things it takes for granted — thorough chilling and a proper breading sequence — are what decide whether the croquettes hold together in the fat.
- Chill until firm, not merely cool"Cool mixture" means refrigerate it until it is solid enough to cut, at least two hours and preferably overnight. Croquettes shaped from lukewarm filling burst in the fryer.
- The sauce is deliberately thickFour tablespoons of flour to one cup of milk is roughly double an ordinary white sauce. That is intentional: it is a panada binder, not a pouring sauce. Cook it a couple of minutes after it thickens to lose the raw-flour taste.
- "Crumb" implies three steps"Crumb" implies more than one step -- period usage generally meant beaten egg and then fine dry breadcrumbs, often with a dusting of flour first. The recipe lists no egg; without it the crumbs are unlikely to adhere. Use one beaten egg thinned with a tablespoon of water or milk.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a single fat for both frying and pastry. Any neutral oil or shortening with a smoke point above 400F works for the frying; butter is fine in the white sauce.
- Frying temperature and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; "hot Crisco" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 375F, deep enough to float the croquettes. Everything inside is already cooked, so they need only a few minutes to brown and heat through. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
- Onion and celeryOnion juice is made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve; a half teaspoon of finely grated onion gives the same effect. Celery salt is still sold, but if you substitute plain salt plus celery seed, cut the added salt accordingly.
- Chop finer than you thinkTwo cups of cooked chicken should be chopped or pulsed to a coarse mince. Large shreds create weak points where the croquette splits.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, enough for four as a main course with a vegetable, or six as a first course.
Crisco's recipe books were written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had only existed since 1911. Hydrogenated cottonseed oil was unfamiliar, and the argument is repeated in nearly every recipe: one tin does the work of both butter and lard, in the sauce and in the frying kettle alike. The "July 11" dateline places this recipe in a calendar-of-dinners arrangement, assigning a menu to each day of the year — a sales device as much as a meal plan. Croquettes appear to have come into American cooking from French practice by way of the late nineteenth-century cooking schools, where a stiff panada binding chopped leftovers was taught as a matter of thrift and technique together.