Home › January › Norwegian Potatoes
Norwegian Potatoes
Wash, scrub and pare six medium size potatoes. Cook in boiling salted water until tender. Drain, pass through ricer. Add six anchovies drained from the oil in bottle and cut in one-fourth inch pieces, one-half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, one-half teaspoon French mustard, salt if necessary, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, a few grains nutmeg, two tablespoons butter, and yolks two eggs slightly beaten. Beat thoroughly, place on range and cook slowly three minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from range, spread mixture on plate to cool, then mold like small eggs. Roll in crumbs, egg and crumbs. Arrange in croquette basket and fry a golden brown in deep, hot Cottolene.
A potato croquette in all but name, and it behaves like one: the mixture has to be dry, well seasoned and thoroughly chilled or the eggs will burst in the fat.
- CottoleneA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, compounded with beef suet, sold heavily in the 1890s and 1900s; it is named here because this book was published to promote it. Any neutral frying fat works: peanut, canola or plain vegetable oil.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Period guidance for already-cooked croquette mixtures was fat hot enough to brown a cube of bread in about forty seconds, which corresponds to roughly 375-390F. Cooler than that and the crumb coat soaks; much hotter and the outside colors before the center is hot.
- Croquette basketA small wire basket that held the croquettes clear of the pan bottom and let them be lifted all at once. A spider skimmer or ordinary fry basket does the same job.
- AnchoviesIf you use modern salt-packed or oil-packed Mediterranean anchovies, six fillets are assertive but correct. Scandinavian tinned "ansjovis" are spiced sprats and sweeter; they would give a rather different, more traditionally Norwegian result.
- The three-minute cookingThis is not a garnish step. Stirring the mixture over low heat sets the yolks and drives off moisture so the paste will hold a shape. Stop while it still pulls cleanly from the pan.
- Cooling and shapingSpread thin on a plate and chill until cold and firm, at least an hour. Warm potato paste will not mold into eggs and will crack in the fat.
- "Roll in crumbs, egg and crumbs"The standard period breading: dry crumbs first so the surface is not wet, then beaten egg thinned with a spoon of water, then crumbs again. The two eggs called for earlier are yolks only; you will need another whole egg for the coating.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; six medium potatoes should make roughly a dozen egg-shaped croquettes.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the makers of Cottolene, and the fried recipes in it tend to name the product by brand, which is why this Norwegian side dish reads like an advertisement in its last line. The dish itself belongs to a wide family of Scandinavian potato-and-anchovy preparations, of which Jansson's temptation is the best known, though that dish is itself a twentieth-century one and the potato became a Nordic staple only in the later eighteenth century. Naming a dish for a nationality was ordinary practice in turn-of-the-century American household books, and the label often signaled little more than one distinguishing ingredient, here the anchovy and the grating of nutmeg. What the recipe really shows is the era's fondness for the croquette: cooked food bound with egg, chilled, breaded and dropped in deep fat, a technique the American kitchen took from French practice and applied to nearly everything on the table.