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Marchette Croquettes
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 tablespoonfuls cooked spinach 3 small cooked potatoes 1 tablespoonful chopped onion Salt and pepper to taste 2 hard-cooked eggs 1 raw egg Breadcrumbs Crisco flake pastry Rub spinach and potatoes through wire sieve; fry onion in Crisco, add spinach and potatoes, season with salt and pepper, fry a few minutes, then set aside till cold. Roll out pastry, cut out some small rounds, then place spoonful of vegetable mixture on half the number of pastry rounds, place slice of hard-cooked egg on each, brush round edges with beaten egg, press other round on this, dip in egg and breadcrumbs and fry in hot Crisco. Serve hot. Sufficient for six croquettes.
A small fried pastry turnover of spinach, potato and egg, from a book written to sell shortening. The mixture must be completely cold and quite dry before it goes into the pastry, or the rounds will steam themselves open in the fat.
- CriscoStill sold, and any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way. Butter can replace it in the filling; for the frying fat use shortening or a neutral oil, since butter will burn at the temperature needed.
- "Crisco flake pastry"A pastry made up elsewhere in the same book with shortening rather than butter, in the manner of a rough puff or flaky short crust. Any plain flaky pastry will do; rolled thin and cut into small rounds of a couple of inches, something in the region of 8 oz should yield the twelve rounds needed for the six croquettes stated.
- Rub through a wire sieveA ricer or food mill does this faster and keeps the potato from turning gluey. A food processor will make potato into paste; avoid it.
- Spinach quantityFour tablespoonfuls of cooked spinach means cooked, drained and chopped — a quarter cup, which is what a few good handfuls of fresh leaves (something like four ounces raw, more if loosely packed) will reduce to. Squeeze it hard in a cloth; wet spinach is the usual cause of a burst croquette.
- Frying temperatureThe original says only "hot Crisco." Aim for 350–375F and enough fat to float the croquettes, three to four minutes, turning once. Below that the pastry drinks fat; above it the outside colours before the pastry cooks through.
- SealingBrush the egg wash on the bottom round only where the two will meet, then press with a fork or the back of a cutter. The egg-and-crumb coating on the outside is a second seal, so let the coated croquettes rest ten minutes in the refrigerator before frying.
- Yield and servingSix croquettes — a first course or light supper dish for two or three, not a main course for six.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911; the recipes lean heavily on the product, which is why shortening appears here in places a British or French cook of the same date would have used butter or lard. The dish itself is a croquette only loosely 股 a filled pastry rather than a bound and crumbed paste 股 and its filling of sieved potato, spinach and hard-cooked egg belongs to the large family of meatless "entrées" that filled out Edwardian and wartime menus cheaply, and that would plausibly have served as Friday or Lenten dishes in Catholic households. The name Marchette is not explained in the book and has no established origin; invented or semi-French dish names were a common flourish in promotional cookbooks of the period, lending a domestic vegetable turnover an air of the restaurant table.