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Potato and Meat Croquettes
Prepare the mixture for White or Sweet Potato Croquettes, adding three-fourths cupful of finely-minced ham, left-over sausage, chopped, cooked bacon, or any other savory meat.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the book's white or sweet potato croquette mixture and simply folds meat into it. A few points on scaling and frying carry over regardless of which base you use.
- The base is missing herePotato croquette mixtures of this period are generally hot riced or mashed potato bound with an egg yolk or two, a spoonful of fat, salt, pepper and sometimes a little cream. Proportions vary, but something in the region of 2 cups potato to 1 egg is a reasonable stand-in if you do not have the book's earlier recipe in front of you; too much liquid is what makes croquettes burst.
- Three-fourths cupful of meatThat is about 4 oz of minced ham or crumbled cooked sausage. The recipe does not say how much potato the base makes; three-quarters of a cup of meat suits a mixture of roughly 2 to 3 cups of potato. Much more and the croquettes may not hold together in the fat.
- Chill before shapingThe hinge of the whole thing. Spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate at least an hour until firm; warm, soft potato mixture will slump off the spoon and disintegrate in hot fat.
- BreadingRoll the shaped cylinders or cones in fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again. Let the coated croquettes rest 15 to 20 minutes so the crust sets.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at about 375F, three to four minutes, until deep gold. The book gives no temperature; the old bread-cube tests (browning while you count roughly forty) point to about this range. Fry three or four at a time so the fat does not drop far below 350F.
- SnowdriftIf this is the Snowdrift cookbook, Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a lard substitute (hydrogenated in its later form). Any neutral frying fat works — peanut, canola, or modern vegetable shortening.
- YieldIf the base is 2 to 3 cups of potato, the mixture with the meat added should give roughly a dozen croquettes, enough for four as a supper dish with a green salad or a tomato sauce.
Croquettes were the standard American answer to leftovers from roughly the 1870s through the Second World War, and cookbooks of the period print them in long strings of variations — chicken, veal, rice, hominy, salmon — because the technique matters more than the filling. The entry's brevity is the point: it comes in the middle of such a run, and the reader is expected to have absorbed the method already. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch. This particular book appears to be a promotional cookbook for Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening generally associated with the Southern Cotton Oil Company in the early twentieth century, which would explain the recipe's cheerful assumption that you have a kettle of deep fat standing ready; branded cookbooks like this were distributed cheaply or free to build the habit of frying in a manufactured fat rather than in home-rendered lard.
Croquettes
2 Cupfuls Finely-minced, Cooked Meat or Fish 1/2 Cupful Thick White Sauce No. 3 ⅛ Teaspoonful Paprika 1 Egg 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt 1/2 1 Tablespoonful Grated Onion (optional) 11/2 Tablespoonfuls Finelyminced Green Pepper (optional) 1 Cupful Sugar 2 Eggs and 1 Egg Yolk 1 Cupful Milk 2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift Put the ingredients together in the order given, adding the egg yolk, unbeaten. Finish according to the directions given for White or Sweet Potato Croquettes. Serve with Cream or White Sauce No. 2, Savory Egg Sauce, or Tomato Sauce. Brown Sauce may be used with Meat Croquettes. Left-over cooked meat or fish, or canned meat or fish of any kind may be used in this way.