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CROQUETTES (au Financiere)
Mince very finely the livers of two fowls, a sweetbread, a shallot, six small mushrooms, and two truffles. Season rather highly with pepper and salt. Put one ounce of butter into a stewpan, let it melt, then mix with it very smoothly and slowly a table-spoonful of flour. When it is lightly browned, add the mince and an ounce of butter, and simmer for ten minutes, stirring all the time. Drain off the fat, add a glass of light wine to the mixture, and simmer it gently for a few minutes longer. When it is cold and stiff, mould it into small balls, and fry these in the usual way. Half a dozen oysters, finely minced, are sometimes added. Sprinkle a little salt over croquettes before serving them. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, sweet-bread, from 1s. to 4s. Sufficient, allow one or two croquettes for each person.
A classic French forcemeat croquette built on a thick roux-bound mince. Everything depends on the mixture setting firm before it goes near hot fat.
- The hinge: chill hardThe mixture must be genuinely cold and stiff before shaping, ideally spread on a plate and refrigerated several hours or overnight. A warm or slack mince will burst in the fryer and empty itself into the fat.
- Sweetbread needs prep firstThe book assumes a cook who already knows this: veal sweetbreads are soaked in cold water, blanched, cooled, then peeled of membrane before use. Raw sweetbread minced straight into the pan will be tough and stringy.
- "A glass of light wine"A wine glass in Victorian cookery books is roughly 2 fl oz, occasionally up to 4. Use 1/4 cup of a dry white; the quantity here is genuinely imprecise, so add it gradually and stop when the mince is moist but still holds a mound.
- Frying timeTen minutes is far too long for small balls. Egg-and-breadcrumb them, then fry at 350-375F for 3-4 minutes until deep gold; the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- "In the usual way"Means a coating: flour, beaten egg, fine dry breadcrumbs. A second egg-and-crumb layer is worth the trouble with a soft filling like this.
- OystersIf you add the optional minced oysters, stir them in at the very end of the simmering, off the heat. Ten minutes in the pan and then a spell in the fryer turns them to rubber.
- TrufflesTwo truffles was a luxury but not an absurdity for the sort of household this book addressed. A teaspoon of truffle paste, or simply doubling the mushrooms and adding a spoonful of Madeira, gets a similar depth without the cost.
- YieldThe quantities will probably give somewhere around a dozen small croquettes; at the book's own reckoning of one or two each, that stretches to several people as a garnish or savoury course.
Financière was one of the standard nineteenth-century French garnishes, and like Nantua or Toulouse it named a fixed combination rather than a method: cockscombs, kidneys, mushrooms, truffles and olives in a Madeira-scented sauce. The name is generally taken to imply expense, the sort of dish a financier could afford, and the truffles and sweetbread here carry that association even though Cassell's has pared the garnish down to a croquette filling. The recipe's price note is revealing: a sweetbread might cost anywhere from one to four shillings, a real sum for a household cook. Croquettes themselves were the respectable Victorian answer to small quantities of costly cooked meat, binding scraps of liver, sweetbread or game in a stiff roux so that a little went round a table.