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Potato Balls
Add to five hot mashed potatoes, one-fourth teaspoon celery salt, one teaspoon finely chopped parsley or chives, salt, pepper and three tablespoons butter, and enough hot milk to make of the consistency to handle. Shape into smooth, round balls, roll in flour, egg and crumbs. Fry a golden brown in deep, hot Cottolene. Dispose around Veal.
A straightforward croquette of mashed potato, breaded and deep-fried. The whole thing turns on how dry and stiff the potato mixture is before you shape it.
- The hinge: keep the potato stiffAdd the hot milk a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the mass holds a shape. Potato that is soft enough to pipe will slump in the fryer and burst the crust.
- "Five potatoes"Genuinely ambiguous — the book assumes a medium boiling potato of the day. Figure about 2 lb of peeled potato, or roughly 4 cups mashed, and adjust seasoning by taste.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which published this book; it no longer exists. Use any neutral high-smoke-point oil or vegetable shortening.
- Frying temperature350–365F. The interior is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust — two to three minutes to a golden brown, turning if the balls are not fully submerged.
- "Flour, egg and crumbs"That is the standard three-stage breading: flour, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water or milk, then dry fine breadcrumbs. Chilling the shaped balls 30 minutes before breading makes them far easier to handle.
- Dry the potatoesDrain the boiled potatoes well and return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to drive off steam before mashing. Wet potato is the usual cause of croquettes that split.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on the size you shape them; a walnut-sized ball is small, so the mixture will make well over a dozen. "Dispose around Veal" means simply ranging them around the roast on the platter -- they should go out at once, as they soften as they sit.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and its repeated instruction to fry in "deep, hot Cottolene" is the reason the book exists: Cottolene was Fairbank's cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening, promoted hard from the 1890s onward as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to lard. Advertising cookbooks like this one were a standard marketing tool of the era, and the recipes are otherwise conventional middle-class American cooking of the period, arranged as fifty-two full Sunday menus so a housekeeper never had to plan. Potato balls themselves belong to the large family of croquettes that entered American home cooking through nineteenth-century French-influenced cookery — a way to turn leftover or extra mashed potato into something that could be arranged decoratively around a roast, which mattered when the platter was carried whole to the table and carved in front of the family.