Home › March › Sweet Potato Croquettes
Sweet Potato Croquettes
2 cups hot riced sweet potatoes. 3 tablespoons butter. 1/2 teaspoon salt.
Few grains pepper. 1/2 cup chopped walnut meats. 1 egg well beaten.
PROCESS: Mix ingredients in the order given. If mixture is too dry add hot milk. Mold in cork-shape croquettes, roll in crumbs, then in egg, again in crumbs, and fry in deep hot Cottolene. Drain on brown paper and arrange around Baked Ham.
A straightforward croquette that hinges entirely on how dry the potato mixture is before it goes into the fat. Everything else is seasoning.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, heavily promoted around 1900 and long discontinued — this book was published by its makers, which is why it appears by name. Any neutral deep-frying fat works: peanut, canola, or vegetable shortening.
- Fat temperatureThe original says only "deep hot." Use 375F. Below about 350F the croquettes drink fat and slump; much above 385F the crumb coating browns before the interior heats through.
- Riced potatoesBake or boil the sweet potatoes whole, then press them through a ricer or food mill while hot; the recipe specifies the potato go in hot. Overworking in a processor can make the purée pasty and harder to mold, so a ricer or food mill is the safer route.
- Consistency, not milkThe instruction to add hot milk if too dry is the one to be careful with. Many sweet potatoes sold today are moist-fleshed, so the mixture is more likely to need firming than loosening. Chill it thoroughly before molding.
- The double coatingCrumbs, then egg, then crumbs again is what the recipe specifies; the likely reason is that the first layer of crumbs gives the wet potato something to grip so the egg wash does not simply sink into it. Do not shorten it to a single pass.
- DrainingBrown paper means unprinted kraft paper or a paper bag. A wire rack over a sheet pan drains better and keeps the crust from steaming soft underneath.
- YieldTwo cups of potato gives roughly 10 to 12 cork-shaped croquettes, enough for four to six as a side dish.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company as advertising for Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold in the later nineteenth century as a cheaper, lighter substitute for lard — which explains why a frying fat is named by brand here while the potatoes are not named by variety. The croquette takes its name and technique from French cookery and was a fixture of American cookery-school teaching in this period: bind a cooked purée, shape it, breadcrumb it, and deep-fry, a technique applied with equal enthusiasm to chicken, rice, salmon and hominy. Pairing sweet potatoes with walnuts and setting them around a baked ham is of a piece with other menus of the era, in which a sweet starch was served alongside salt-cured meat.