Home › Croquettes, Etc › Westphalia Croquettes
Westphalia Croquettes
Four ounces finely chopped ham, one pound of mashed potatoes, onehalf gill of sweet cream, two ounces of butter, half teaspoon pepper. Beat the potatoes and cream together, add the other ingredients, mould into round balls, dip in beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs, and fry in lard.
A simple ham-and-potato croquette that depends almost entirely on how dry the potato is. The ingredient list is workable as written; the frying instructions assume a cook who already knows what hot fat looks like.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. "Sweet cream" simply means fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from cream that has been allowed to sour.
- The hinge: dry potatoesMash made from boiled, waterlogged potatoes will not hold a ball and will burst in the fat. Bake or steam the potatoes, or drain and dry them in the pan over low heat before mashing, and mix in the cream and butter while hot.
- Chill before shapingThe original moves straight from mixing to moulding. An hour in the refrigerator firms the mixture and makes both the shaping and the crumbing far easier.
- Westphalia hamWestphalian ham is a dry-cured, juniper-smoked German ham, eaten raw in thin slices. Any well-flavoured dry-cured ham, including prosciutto or a good country ham, gives the intended result; ordinary wet-cured sandwich ham will taste watery here.
- No salt listedThe recipe seasons with pepper only, on the assumption that the ham carries the salt. With a mild ham, taste the mixture and correct before shaping.
- Frying in lardDeep-fry at 350-375F. Lard works well and was the standard fat, but any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash; three to four minutes gives a brown crust without the interior turning to paste.
- Double crumbingFor a crust that survives the fryer, dip in beaten egg (loosened with a spoonful of water or milk) and crumb, then repeat. Rest the crumbed balls ten minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- YieldThe ingredients make about a pound and a half of mixture: roughly a dozen good-sized croquettes, or more if shaped smaller, enough for four as a first course or a light supper with a green salad.
Croquettes occupy a whole section in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks because they solved a standing domestic problem: what to do with the cold remains of a joint or a bowl of yesterday's mashed potato. Bound with egg, crumbed and fried, leftovers reappeared as something that could be sent to table without apology. The "Westphalia" label points to the ham rather than to any German dish of this name; Westphalian ham, smoked over beech and juniper in the region east of the Rhine, was a byword for quality imported charcuterie in English and American writing of the period, and attaching the name to a recipe signalled that the ham should be a good dry-cured one. Lard is specified as a matter of course, since it was the ordinary frying fat of the American kitchen well before commercial vegetable shortening displaced it.