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Beef Croquettes
Melt 2 tablespoons Crisco, stir in 1 tablespoon flour, gradually add 1/2 pint milk, stir till it boils 4 minutes, add salt and pepper to taste; 1/2 pound cold cooked chopped beef and 4 tablespoons breadcrumbs. Turn out on plate to cool. Divide into 8 pieces, flour them and make into neat croquettes. Egg and breadcrumb them. Fry till brown in hot Crisco. Drain and serve hot with brown sauce.
A leftovers dish built on a thick white sauce binder, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The measurements work, but the flour is light for the amount of milk and the chilling step is understated.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Turn out on plate to cool" means cool until firm, not merely warm. Spread the mixture no more than an inch thick and refrigerate at least an hour, or the croquettes will slump in the fat and burst.
- Half a pint of milkOne US cup, 8 fl oz. If you are working from a British edition, an imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, which will give a noticeably looser panada.
- The flour is on the low sideOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk makes a pouring sauce, not a binder. The 4 tablespoons of breadcrumbs are doing much of the thickening; if the cooled mixture will not hold a shape, work in more crumbs rather than trying to reboil it.
- "Stir till it boils 4 minutes"Boil the sauce for four minutes after it thickens. That is longer than modern practice but it does cook out the raw flour taste and drive off water, which helps the mixture set.
- CriscoOrdinary vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. Butter works for the sauce; for frying, any neutral oil with a high smoke point is fine.
- Egg and breadcrumb themBeaten egg, thinned with a teaspoon of water, then dry fine crumbs. A double coat — crumb, egg, crumb — is worth the trouble with a soft filling.
- FryingDeep fat at 375F, two or three croquettes at a time so the temperature holds. They are already cooked through, so you are only browning the crust: two to three minutes.
- YieldEight croquettes, which serves two generously or four as part of a larger meal with the brown sauce and a vegetable.
Croquettes were the standard nineteenth-century answer to cold roast meat: bind it with a thick white sauce, chill, shape, crumb and fry, and yesterday's joint reappears as something that looks deliberate. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique reached Anglo-American cookbooks through French professional kitchens, where the same panada method produced everything from chicken to salmon to rice croquettes. This version's distinguishing feature is the shortening: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by the makers of Crisco, which came on the market in the early 1910s, and its recipes call for the new hydrogenated vegetable fat where a cook would previously have reached for lard or butter.