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Oyster Croquettes
Scald and chop fine hard part of the oysters (after taking the other part and liquor for a soup), add an equal weight of mashed potato; to one pound of this add lump of butter the size of an egg, tea-spoon salt, half tea-spoon of pepper, and quarter of a tea-cup cream. Make in small cakes, dip in egg and then in bread-crumbs, and fry like doughnuts.
A thrift recipe: it assumes you have already made oyster soup and are using what is left. The potato does the binding, so the moisture content of the mash decides whether these hold together.
- The hinge: keep the mixture stiff and coldThere is no flour or panade here, only mashed potato, so a wet mash will collapse in the fat. Use a dry, starchy potato mashed without milk, and chill the shaped cakes at least 30 minutes before breading.
- "Hard part of the oysters"The firm adductor muscle and body, as distinct from the soft frill and the liquor reserved for soup. If you are starting from a pint of shucked oysters rather than soup leftovers, simply use whole oysters and drain them well.
- Scald, do not cookA few seconds in the hot liquor is enough to firm them for chopping. Oysters held at a simmer for more than two or three minutes tighten into rubber, and croquettes made from them taste of nothing but breadcrumbs.
- Lump of butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Quarter of a tea-cup of creamNineteenth-century tea-cups ran between a half and three-quarters of a cup, so this is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. Add the smaller amount first and stop as soon as the mixture just coheres.
- "Fry like doughnuts"Deep fat, 365-375F, enough to float the cakes, turning once. They need only 2 to 3 minutes, since everything in them is already cooked; you are setting the crust. Drain on paper.
- BreadingBeaten whole egg loosened with a spoonful of water coats more evenly, and a second pass through crumbs is worth it at these frying temperatures.
- YieldOne pound of the oyster-and-potato mixture makes roughly 10 to 12 small cakes, enough for four as a first course with lemon or a plain cream sauce.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, and its oyster recipes are a good measure of what the railroads had done to the interior: barrels of iced and canned oysters moved inland from Baltimore and the Chesapeake in such volume that a landlocked Midwestern household could serve them far more freely than before. The croquette itself is a French borrowing that American cookbooks of the period adopted enthusiastically, largely because it solved a domestic problem — what to do with cooked odds and ends. Note how this recipe is written as a sequel: the tender parts and the liquor have already gone into soup, and the tough muscle that would be unpleasant in a stew is chopped, bound with potato, and fried into something else entirely.