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Meat Croquettes
Take any kind of cooked meat at hand. The remains of fowl, a few slices of ham, with an appropriate seasoning of chopped mushrooms, grated nutmeg, pepper, etc.; or cold roast beef, with a small bunch of mixed savoury herbs, some minced shallot, an anchovy, pepper, and salt. Put the meat into a stewpan. If fowl, allow to every half pound of meat two ounces of ham, which may be chopped, or cut in small slices. Moisten with three table-spoonfuls of white sauce, and stew for a few minutes, when stir in the yolks of three eggs, and let it stand until the eggs are set. Turn the meat out on a large dish, spread it over evenly, and when quite cold divide it into equal portions, and, with the help of fine bread-crumbs, roll into balls or any other shapes, according to fancy; smear well with egg, and cover thickly with more bread-crumbs. Fry at once in boiling lard, drain, and serve on a napkin, with a garnish of parsley. For beef croquettes, add, after the eggs have set, oysters, cut into four, and use some of their liquor for the sauce. If white sauce is not at hand, melt an ounce of butter, mix in a spoonful of flour, add a gill of stock, and stir in a pound of mince.
A Victorian way of using up cooked meat: bind it with egg and a little sauce, chill it hard, shape, crumb and fry. The method is sound, but two of the quantities need reading carefully.
- The hinge: chill it completelyThe mixture must be spread thin on a dish and left until quite cold — several hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Warm or barely cool mixture will not hold a shape and the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- Setting the eggs, not scrambling themThree yolks stirred into a hot pan will curdle if the heat is up. Take the stewpan off the flame, stir the yolks through, then return it to the lowest possible heat only until the mixture thickens and clings to the spoon.
- A gillIn a British source, a quarter of a pint: about 5 imperial fl oz, roughly 140 ml. In the fallback sauce at the end, 1 oz butter and a spoonful of flour with a gill of stock gives a thick binding sauce, which is what you want.
- "Stir in a pound of mince"That final sentence describes making the sauce and combining it with a pound of minced meat, not adding meat to the three tablespoons called for earlier. Read it as an alternative to the white sauce, with the sauce scaled to the meat.
- Frying fat and temperature"Boiling lard" means fat at 350–375°F, deep enough to float the croquettes. Lard fries beautifully here; any neutral fat with a high smoke point will do. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The oystersQuartered raw oysters stirred into the hot beef mixture will cook through in the pan and again in the fryer. Add them at the very end, off the heat, or they turn to rubber. Use their liquor to loosen the sauce.
- The anchovyOne salted or oil-packed fillet, mashed to nothing, is a seasoning rather than an ingredient — it reads as depth, not fish. Salt cautiously afterwards.
- Yield and servingA pound of meat should make roughly eight to ten croquettes. The napkin is the conventional service of the period; a wire rack over paper drains better. Serve hot, within minutes of frying.
Croquette comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form belongs to the great nineteenth-century economy of leftovers — a household that roasted a joint or a fowl every few days needed respectable ways to bring cold meat back to the table. It is a technique rather than a fixed recipe: bind, chill, shape, crumb, fry, and the filling is whatever the larder holds. The two variations given here are a small map of Victorian flavour instinct — fowl paired with ham, nutmeg and mushroom; beef paired with shallot, herbs, anchovy and oyster, oysters then being cheap enough to treat as seasoning. Serving deep-fried dishes on a folded napkin with a parsley garnish was common in this period.