Croquettes
Mince beef, veal or lamb as fire as possible, season with salt and pepper, a small dash of powdered mace, a piece of onion the size of a pea, grated, then make for it a sauce in this way: Take a large tablespoon of butter, two tablespoons of flour, one-half tumbler of cream or milk, a little salt; mix smoothly together and boil, stirring all the time. When you take it from the fire put in the yolks of two eggs well beaten and stir the meat together. When hard and cold, shape and fry in hot lard.
A classic croquette formula built on a thick white sauce binder, written for the cook who had roast meat left from dinner. The original assumes several things it never says, and the omissions are where it goes wrong.
- "As fire as possible"A typesetting error for "as fine as possible." Mince the meat very fine — a food processor pulsed briefly, or two passes through a grinder. Coarse meat will not hold together in the fat.
- The meat is already cookedNothing here cooks raw meat through; the frying only browns the outside. Use cooked beef, veal or lamb — leftover roast is what the book intends — chilled and trimmed of gristle.
- Half a tumblerA tumbler is a plain drinking glass of roughly 8 fluid ounces, so half a tumbler is about 1/2 cup of milk or cream. With 1 tablespoon butter and 2 tablespoons flour this makes a very stiff sauce, which is exactly right for a binder.
- Proportion of sauce to meatThe original never says how much meat. Aim for about 2 cups of minced meat to this quantity of sauce. Too much sauce and the croquettes slump in the pan; too little and they crumble.
- Adding the yolksOff the heat, as directed, and stir them in quickly. If the pan is still on the fire they scramble and you get lumps through the mixture.
- Cold is not optionalThe hinge of the whole recipe. Spread the mixture in a shallow dish and refrigerate at least three hours, preferably overnight, until it is genuinely firm. Warm croquette mixture disintegrates the moment it meets the fat.
- The missing coatingPeriod cookbooks usually breaded croquettes — flour, then beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs — and this one simply forgets to. Without a crust the binder will leak. Coat them.
- FryingDeep fat at 360–375F, enough to float them, two or three at a time so the temperature holds. Two to three minutes gives a brown crust; longer only dries the inside. Lard is what the book calls for and it works well, but any neutral fat will do.
- YieldAbout 12 croquettes of the usual cone or cork shape, serving four as a supper dish.
Croquettes belong to the nineteenth-century household economy of leftovers: a Sunday roast reappeared on Tuesday minced, bound and fried, and looked like a new dish. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique — cooked meat suspended in a very thick béchamel, chilled until sliceable, then breaded and fried — came into American and British cooking through French professional kitchens. Supper was the lighter evening meal after a midday dinner, and croquettes made from the dinner meat were among its stock dishes. The grated onion "the size of a pea" and the dash of mace are period seasoning in miniature.