Home › Vegetarian Dishes › Potato and Nut Croquettes
Potato and Nut Croquettes
2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls riced potatoes 1 tablespoonful milk Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste Few drops onion juice 1 egg and 1 yolk of egg 1/3 cupful chopped nut meats 1/4 cupful cream 1/4 cupful breadcrumbs Mix potatoes with Crisco, milk, yolk of egg, onion juice and seasonings, and mix well. Put cream and breadcrumbs into small saucepan and stir to thick paste, then cool; now add nuts, salt and pepper to taste and half yolk of egg. Inclose some of nut mixture in potato mixture, making ingredients into neat croquettes. Beat up remainder of egg with tablespoonful of water. Roll croquettes in fine breadcrumbs, brush over with egg, and again roll in crumbs. Fry in hot Crisco to golden brown, then drain. Crisco should be heated until a crumb of bread becomes a golden brown in forty seconds. Serve hot decorated with parsley.
Sufficient for eight croquettes.
A stuffed croquette: a seasoned potato shell around a nut-and-cream paste, breaded twice and deep fried. The original is from a Crisco promotional cookbook, which explains the shortening in every step.
- The hinge: chill before fryingThe recipe never says it, but formed croquettes need at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator before they go into the fat. Warm potato loosens in hot oil and the seam splits, spilling the filling.
- Frying temperature"A crumb of bread golden brown in forty seconds" indicates a hot fat, somewhere around 375F by the usual bread-test tables, though the test is only approximate. Any modern neutral frying oil works; Crisco here is simply the sponsor's product, not a technical requirement.
- The egg count is muddledYou are told to use one whole egg and one yolk, then the yolk goes into the potato, "half yolk" into the nut paste, and "remainder of egg" into the wash. In practice: one yolk in the potatoes, a spoonful of beaten egg in the nut paste, and the whole egg beaten with a tablespoon of water for the coating.
- Riced potatoesTwo cupfuls of riced potato is roughly a pound of potatoes, boiled in their skins, peeled hot and pushed through a ricer. The ricer keeps the potato light and dry; overworking it, particularly with a beater, turns it gluey and makes the croquettes harder to shape.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne, used as a whisper rather than a seasoning in its own right. A pinch in each mixture is enough.
- Onion juiceGrate half an onion on a fine grater and press the pulp in a sieve or cloth. It gives onion flavour without pieces that would break the potato shell.
- The cream-and-crumb pasteThis is a panade, cooked to a stiff mass over low heat and cooled completely before the nuts go in. If it is still soft it cannot be enclosed. Walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts all suit.
- Double breadingCrumbs, egg wash, crumbs again is deliberate and worth following exactly; a single coat will not survive the fryer on a filled croquette. Use fine dry crumbs, not fresh.
- YieldEight croquettes, which is a side dish for four or a light main course for two with a salad.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening; the book's habit of specifying Crisco for creaming, for shortening and for deep frying alike is advertising built into the method. Croquettes themselves were a staple of American middle-class cookery of the period, prized because they turned leftover potato, fish or meat into something that looked composed on a plate, and the name comes from the French croquer, to crunch. The nut filling reflects another current of the era: nuts were widely promoted, particularly in vegetarian and health-reform circles, as a protein that could stand in for meat, and a meatless croquette like this one would have read as both economical and faintly progressive.