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Croquettes
Meat, chicken or game croquettes are made as follows: Chop the meat fine, and with it allow three teaspoonfuls of chopped parsley to each pound of meat or fowl ; add the same quantity of onions chopped fine if you like them. Add salt, pepper and mace to taste. Make a panada, with but little water, of half a pound of bread to each pound of meat. Butter the bread well. Break four eggs, add a grated nutmeg, and beat meat and eggs thoroughly. Then add the panada, mix, add three tablespoonfuls of cream, and work the whole thoroughly together. Roll into proper shapes, dip in white of egg, and then in bread-crumbs, and fry in boiling lard.
A Victorian all-purpose croquette formula built on a bread panada rather than the thick béchamel most cooks use today. The proportions are generous with binder, and the text as printed repeats a line of type mid-sentence.
- Use cooked meatThe recipe does not say whether the meat is raw or cooked, but croquettes of this type were normally made from meat already cooked, which is why nothing here cooks the filling through. A few minutes in fat will brown the crust and heat the centre, not cook raw meat or poultry, so start with meat that is already fully cooked and cooled.
- The typesetting errorThe phrase "three teaspoonfuls of chopped parsley to each pound of" is set twice. Read it once: 3 teaspoons chopped parsley per pound of meat, and the same volume of chopped onion if wanted.
- PanadaA paste of bread moistened with liquid and worked smooth; here half a pound of bread per pound of meat, and the text also directs that the bread be buttered well, though it does not make clear whether that comes before or after the bread is moistened. That is a heavy ratio by modern standards and gives a soft, bready croquette. Cutting the bread to a third of a pound per pound of meat gives a meatier result and still binds.
- "But little water"Add liquid a spoonful at a time until the bread turns to a stiff paste with no dry crumbs and no free moisture. A wet panada is the usual reason croquettes burst in the fat.
- Mace and nutmegMace is the lacy aril of the nutmeg, milder and more floral. A whole grated nutmeg on top of it is very assertive for a pound or two of meat; a quarter of a nutmeg is closer to modern taste.
- Chill before shapingNot in the original but the single most useful step. Spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate at least two hours; cold mixture shapes cleanly and holds together in the fat.
- Frying"Boiling lard" means fat at frying heat, not literally boiling. Work at 365-375F and fry in small batches so the temperature does not drop. Lard is still excellent here; any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job.
- CoatingEgg white alone, as written, gives a thin crust. Whole egg beaten with a spoonful of water grips the crumbs better, and a second pass through egg and crumbs makes a shell that will not split.
- YieldA pound of meat with its panada makes roughly twelve croquettes, enough for four as a main course with a sauce.
Croquettes were a cornerstone of nineteenth-century household economy: a way to turn Sunday's roast or the remains of a boiled fowl into something that looked deliberate on Tuesday. The word is French, from croquer, to crunch, and the dish came into English and American kitchens through the professional French cookery that shaped middle-class dining manuals from the mid-1800s onward. The bread panada here is the older binding method; over the following decades it was generally said to have been displaced by a stiff cream sauce, which is why modern croquettes are so much softer inside. The instruction to fry in lard reflects a period when rendered pork fat was commonly used for deep frying.