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Tomato Croquettes
Cook 1 quart tomatoes until reduced to 2 cups. Add to them 2 cups crumbs, 3 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt, dust sugar, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, pinch red pepper, and dust of nutmeg. Set away to cool. Shape into croquettes, roll in flour, brush over with beaten egg, toss in crumbs and fry in hot Crisco.
A meatless croquette built on nothing but reduced tomato and breadcrumbs, which makes the texture of the cooled paste the whole game. Two details in the original need translating: the crumbs are dry, not fresh, and "Crisco" is simply shortening.
- The hinge: reduce hard, then chill hardA quart of tomatoes must cook down to a genuine 2 cups of thick pulp, stirred so it does not scorch, or the paste will never hold a shape. After mixing, refrigerate at least two hours until firm; the original says only "set away to cool."
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was published to promote it. Any neutral solid shortening or a neutral frying oil works for both the 3 tablespoons in the mixture and the frying.
- CrumbsThe recipe says only "crumbs" in both places, in the body of the mixture and for the coating; dry, fine breadcrumbs are the safer reading, since fresh soft crumbs absorb differently and tend to give a slacker paste.
- "Dust" and "pinch"Roughly an eighth of a teaspoon each for the sugar and nutmeg, less for the red pepper. The sugar is there to correct the acidity of the tomato, not to sweeten.
- TomatoesThe recipe says only "1 quart tomatoes." A quart of canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice works well; fresh tomatoes vary in water content, so judge by the finished 2 cups rather than by weight.
- Frying temperatureThe original says only "hot Crisco." As a modern equivalent, deep fat around 375F, three or four croquettes at a time so the temperature holds. They need only two to three minutes -- the mixture is already cooked and you are setting the crust, not heating the interior.
- Coating orderFlour, then beaten egg, then crumbs, exactly as written. Skipping the flour is the usual cause of a coating that slides off a wet tomato paste in the fat.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; roughly four cups of mixture, which will make eight or more croquettes depending on the size you shape.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s to demonstrate what could be done with Crisco, then a new hydrogenated shortening; the recipes name the product in nearly every list of ingredients, which is why it appears twice here for what any cook would otherwise have called fat. The croquette itself belongs to a much older tradition of shaping a stiff, cooled panada into cylinders and frying them, a technique generally traced to French kitchen practice and enormously popular in American cookbooks from the 1880s onward as a way of stretching small quantities or presenting vegetables in an elegant form.