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Chicken Croquettes
One pint of finely chopped chicken, tablespoonful of salt, half teaspoonful of white pepper, cup of cream or chicken broth, one tablespoonful of flour, two eggs, onehalf teaspoonful of onion juice, teaspoonful lemon juice, pint of crumbs, three tablespoonfuls butter. Mix flour and buttter together on the fire; then with broth or cream, add chicken and seasoning, boil two minutes, then add the beaten eggs. Take from the fire and let the mixture cool; When cold, shape and fry in boiling lard. Veal, mutton, lamb, beef and turkey can be prepared in the same manner. Served with tomato sauce.
A classic croquette panada: a butter-and-flour roux bound with cream, stiffened with egg, chilled hard, then breaded and deep-fried. The recipe as printed leaves out a few steps a cook of 1900 would have supplied from habit.
- The hinge: chill it solidThe mixture must be spread in a shallow pan and refrigerated until firm all the way through, at least four hours and preferably overnight. Warm or soft croquette paste bursts in the fat and the whole batch is lost.
- The salt is too muchA tablespoon of salt to a pint of chopped chicken is a very heavy hand by current taste, especially with salted butter and commercial broth. Start with a scant teaspoon and correct the cooled mixture before shaping.
- That pint of crumbsThe crumbs are for coating, not for the mixture — the text never says so. Set up the usual three trays: flour, an extra beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then the crumbs. The two eggs in the ingredient list all go into the panada.
- "Boiling lard"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble briskly around a crumb, roughly 365-375F. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash, three to four minutes to a deep brown.
- One pint of chopped chickenVolume, not weight — roughly 10 to 12 oz of cooked meat, about what a small roast bird or a couple of large poached breasts and thighs will give. Chop it fine by hand; a food processor turns it to paste.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze the grated flesh in a cloth. Half a teaspoon of grated onion pulp is a fair substitute.
- Boil two minutesThe roux and liquid should be genuinely thick and glossy before the eggs go in, and the eggs should be tempered with a little of the hot mixture rather than dumped in cold, or they will scramble in threads.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly twelve croquettes, enough for four to six. Tomato sauce is the period pairing; drain the croquettes on paper and sauce the plate rather than the croquette so the crust stays crisp.
The croquette is generally traced to French practice, and while it appears in English-language cookbooks earlier, it became common in American ones over the second half of the nineteenth century as one of the standard uses for cooked meat left from a roast — which is why this recipe ends by telling you veal, mutton, lamb, beef and turkey all work the same way. The technique is essentially a very thick béchamel used as glue: enough binder to hold chopped meat in a shape, enough egg to set it firm when cold. Cooking schools of the period are often said to have taught croquettes as a set exercise, since they test roux, seasoning and deep-frying at once, and the cone or cork shape was a point of pride.