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Oyster Croquettes
One pint of raw oysters, half a pint of cooked veal, two tablespoonfuls of butter, five spoonfuls of cracker crumbs, the yolks of four eggs, two small tablespoons of onion juice. Chop the oysters and veal very fine. Soak the cracker in the oyster liquor, mix well all the ingredients and then shape. Dip in egg, and roll in cracker crumbs, fry in hot lard. The butter should be melted before mixing with the above ingredients.
An unusual croquette: instead of a thick white-sauce panada, the binder here is egg yolk and cracker soaked in oyster liquor, so the mixture is raw when it goes into the fat. That one fact governs everything about handling it.
- Chill before shaping, and again after breadingWith only yolks and softened cracker holding it together, the mixture is slack straight from the bowl. Refrigerate it an hour before shaping, and another 30 minutes after the egg-and-crumb coating, or the croquettes will split in the fat.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint of shucked oysters is about 16 to 24 medium ones with their liquor; half a pint of cooked veal, chopped fine, is a cup by volume (nearer 5 to 6 oz by weight). The "five spoonfuls" of cracker crumbs is genuinely ambiguous — tablespoons is the likely reading, and you may need more to bring the mixture to a shapeable stiffness.
- Cracker means soda crackerCracker probably means a plain soda or common cracker rather than a sweet biscuit; saltines crushed fine are a reasonable stand-in. Use the reserved oyster liquor to soak them, as directed, and strain it first for grit and shell.
- Onion juiceGrate a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in cheesecloth. Two tablespoons is a good deal of juice — expect to grate most of a medium onion.
- Season itThe recipe lists no salt or pepper; the oyster liquor and the crackers would have carried some salt, though the omission may simply be assumed knowledge on the cook's part. Taste the mixture before shaping and add salt, white pepper and a little cayenne or mace as you see fit.
- The fatLard is still the best choice for flavour, but any fat with a high smoke point works. Hold it at 365-375F: below that the coating soaks, above it the crust colours before the raw interior sets.
- Frying and donenessFry in small batches, about 3 to 4 minutes, turning once, to deep gold. Because the filling starts raw, aim for 160F at the centre — oysters go tough with long cooking, so keep the croquettes small (about 2 oz each) so the inside cooks in the time the crust takes.
- YieldAbout a dozen croquettes, serving four as a main course with a lemon or tartar sauce, or six as a first course.
Croquettes were everywhere in American and British cookery between about 1880 and 1920 — the standard way for a household to turn small quantities of cooked meat, fish or shellfish into something that looked like a made dish. Oysters were then cheap and plentiful along the Atlantic coast, shipped inland by rail and barrel, and they appear in this sort of book far more often than modern prices would suggest; the half pint of cooked veal is doing the humble work of stretching them and giving the mixture body without competing in flavour. Onion juice, extracted by grating and pressing, was a favourite Victorian trick for getting onion flavour without visible pieces in a delicate forcemeat. This recipe binds with egg rather than the flour-and-milk panada familiar from other croquette recipes — the two approaches coexisted in nineteenth-century cookery — and the resulting mixture is closer to a quenelle than to the panada-based croquettes of cookery-school teaching.