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Egg Croquettes
Boil ten or twelve eggs until hard. Cut the yolks and whites in shapes. Mix with white sauce and fine bread crumbs sufficient to form with the hand. When cold, season with pepper and salt, make into cakes, roll in crumbs. Let the cakes stand one hour, and fry in hot butter and lard mixed.
A frugal use of hard-boiled eggs, and one that hinges entirely on getting the mixture cold and firm before it meets the fat.
- The hinge: chill hard, twiceThe mixture must be genuinely cold and stiff before shaping, and the shaped cakes need their full hour of resting so the crumb coat dries. Warm or loose croquettes burst in the pan and the filling boils out.
- White sauce quantityNone is given. Aim for a very thick bechamel — about 2 tbsp butter, 3 tbsp flour and 3/4 cup milk for a dozen eggs — stiff enough to hold a spoon upright. If it slumps, the croquettes will not stand.
- "Cut in shapes"Most likely simply cutting the whites into small pieces and breaking up the yolks, rather than carving decorative forms, though the phrase is ambiguous. Handling whites and yolks separately keeps the pieces distinct in the mixture.
- Bread crumbsUse dry, fine crumbs made from stale bread, not coarse panko, both in the mixture and for the coating. Add crumbs to the mixture a spoonful at a time; too many and the croquettes taste of pasty bread.
- CoatingThe original rolls in crumbs alone. A pass through beaten egg between two crumb coats holds far better in the pan, and egg-and-crumb coating appears in other croquette recipes of the period.
- Butter and lard mixedThe lard raises the smoke point so the butter does not blacken. Half and half, about 1/4 inch deep, held at 350-360F; shallow-fry and turn once. Any neutral fat with a little butter does the same job.
- SeasoningEgg and white sauce are both bland, so season more assertively than you expect. Salt and white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg, which often appears in period white sauces.
- YieldTen to twelve eggs make roughly 12 to 16 croquettes, enough for four to six as a light supper or luncheon dish. Serve hot with more white sauce, tomato sauce, or a green salad.
Croquettes were a familiar feature of American household cookery because they solved a standing problem: what to do with cooked food already in the house. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique — bind cooked scraps in a stiff sauce, chill, crumb, fry — arrived with the wave of French-influenced cookery that shaped genteel American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century. Egg croquettes belong to the meatless end of that repertoire, useful on any day when eggs were plentiful and meat was not; a dozen eggs stretched with white sauce and stale bread fed a family cheaply while still arriving at the table looking like a made dish. The instruction to fry in butter and lard mixed is a small period marker in itself, from a time when deep-frying in a thermostatically controlled kettle was not yet normal in a home kitchen.