Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton Croquettes
Mutton Croquettes
Remove any bone or gristle from the remains of cold roast mutton, and chop the meat small; season with salt and pepper. Boil and mash some potatoes; mix sufficient flour and a beaten egg with it to make a paste; roll out and cut into rounds, put some meat on each, turn it over and join the edges together. Fry to a nice brown in hot fat.
A leftovers dish with almost no measurements, which is normal for this book — the proportions depend on how much cold mutton is in the larder. The hinge is the potato paste: too wet and the croquettes burst in the fat.
- Working proportionsAbout 1 lb chopped cooked mutton to 1 lb mashed potato makes a manageable batch of eight to ten. Bind the potato with roughly 2 oz (½ cup) flour and one egg, adding flour a spoonful at a time until the paste holds a rolled shape without sticking.
- Dry the potatoBoil the potatoes whole in their skins, or drain floury potatoes and return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to steam off moisture. Wet mash will not roll and will absorb fat in the pan.
- Cool before shapingMix the paste warm but shape and fill it cold. Chilling the sealed croquettes for half an hour firms the crust and greatly reduces the chance of a seam splitting open in the fat.
- Sealing the edges"Turn it over and join the edges together" makes a half-moon turnover. Press firmly and pinch, and keep the filling well back from the rim — a stray shred of meat in the seal is where they open.
- Mutton, if you can get itTrue mutton — sheep over about two years — is uncommon in most shops now. Cold roast lamb shoulder or leg is the closest substitute; it is milder, so be generous with the pepper, and a little chopped onion or a spoon of the cold gravy is in keeping with period practice.
- The fat and the heatShallow-fry in about half an inch of dripping, lard or a neutral oil at 350–360°F. Hotter and the potato browns before it heats through; cooler and it soaks. Three to four minutes a side gives the "nice brown" wanted.
- Reheating cooked meatThe meat goes into the pan already cooked, so the frying is only to brown and heat. Make these with mutton that has been properly chilled since roasting, and get the centres hot right through rather than merely warm.
- Yield and servingEight to ten croquettes, enough for four as a supper dish. Traditional accompaniments are a sharp sauce — tomato, brown or a caper sauce echoing boiled mutton — and a plain green vegetable.
Cassell's is a household dictionary rather than a chef's book, and this entry shows it: the aim is to use up Monday's cold joint without the family noticing it is Sunday's dinner again. Mutton was the workaday roast of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, cheaper and more plentiful than beef, and a large joint was expected to reappear in hashes, rissoles and croquettes for days. Strictly, a croquette is a French form — bound, shaped, crumbed and fried — and the word is generally traced to croquer, to crunch; what is described here is closer to a potato turnover, the sort of thing a Cornish or Bedfordshire cook would have recognised without the French name. The borrowing is itself telling: by the end of the nineteenth century English domestic manuals reached for French vocabulary to dignify economical cookery, and "croquette" sounded better on a menu card than "fried leftovers".