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Potato Croquette
About one quart of mashed potatoes, one tablespoonful of melted butter and the same of sweet cream, the yolks of two well beaten eggs and a little salt; make them in oval balls, beat the yolks of two eggs with one tablespoonful of water, one teaspoonful of olive oil or the same of melted butter. Have some sifted bread crumbs and then cover them first in this mixture, then roll them in the bread crumbs and fry quickly in good sweet lard.
A plain potato croquette of the type that turned up at supper tables through the late nineteenth century. Nothing here is unsafe; the only real risks are watery potato and cool fat.
- The hinge: dry, stiff potatoThe mixture must be dry enough to hold an oval without slumping, so use baking potatoes, mash them without milk, and let the steam escape before adding butter and cream. Wet mash will burst in the fat no matter how well breaded.
- QuantitiesA quart of mashed potato is about 2 lb of potatoes before cooking, roughly 4 cups mashed. That yields something like 12 to 16 croquettes, or supper for four to six.
- Sweet cream and sweet lard"Sweet" in this period means fresh rather than soured or rancid, not sugared. Use ordinary heavy cream and any clean neutral frying fat; lard gives the closest result to the original.
- Chill before breadingThe recipe does not say so, but half an hour in the refrigerator after shaping makes the croquettes far easier to coat and much less likely to fall apart.
- Egg washTwo yolks with a tablespoon of water and a teaspoon of oil is a thin, rich wash. Whole eggs work as well and stretch further; the oil is there to help the crumbs adhere and brown.
- "Fry quickly"The recipe gives no fat depth or temperature. For deep fat, 360-375F works: two to three minutes to a deep gold is enough since everything inside is already cooked; cooler fat soaks in and the croquettes go greasy and split.
- CrumbsSifted bread crumbs here means dried, fine crumbs made from stale bread, not the coarse fresh sort. Fine dry crumbs give the smooth even shell the recipe assumes.
- ServingSend them out hot, drained on paper, as a supper dish with cold meat or on their own. They do not hold well and reheat poorly.
Croquettes were the standard American answer to leftovers between about 1870 and 1920, and cookbooks of the period print them by the dozen: potato, rice, chicken, salmon, hominy, anything that could be bound with egg, shaped, crumbed and fried. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived with the general nineteenth-century enthusiasm for French cookery in genteel American households, though the dish as used here is thoroughly domestic. It belongs to the world of supper, the light evening meal that followed a heavy midday dinner, which ran on things the cook could make from the morning's mashed potatoes without lighting the range for long.