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Sweetbreads, Croquettes Of
Take a cold dressed sweetbread, cut it into quarter-inch dice, and mix with it its bulk in mushrooms which have been cut in the same way. Stir both together over a gentle fire in some very thick white sauce, and pour the mixture upon a dish. When quite cold, divide the mixture into portions of an equal size, roll these to the shape of balls or corks, dip them in egg beaten up with pepper, salt, and oil, and roll them in bread-crumbs. Fry in hot fat till crisp and lightly browned, drain them, serve on a hot napkin, and garnish with parsley. Time, ten minutes to fry the croquettes.
A classic croquette in miniature: the whole thing depends on a binding sauce stiff enough to set solid when cold. Everything else is assembly.
- "Cold dressed sweetbread" means already cookedThe recipe assumes a sweetbread that has been soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, trimmed of membrane, pressed under a weight and poached or braised — usually yesterday's leftover. Starting from raw, allow two to three hours of soaking and blanching before you reach the point where this recipe begins.
- How much a sweetbread isThe recipe specifies no quantities. A veal heart sweetbread might run somewhere around 8-12 oz trimmed; with an equal bulk of mushrooms and the sauce, that gives appreciably more than a pound of mixture, and the number of croquettes depends entirely on the size you roll them.
- "Very thick white sauce" is thicker than you thinkThis is a panada-strength béchamel — about 2 oz butter and 2 oz flour to half a pint of milk, cooked until it comes away from the pan in a mass. An ordinary pouring béchamel will not set and the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- The hinge: chill hard"When quite cold" means genuinely cold, spread no more than an inch deep and refrigerated at least two hours, preferably overnight. Warm or soft mixture cannot be shaped or crumbed and will leak.
- Cook the mushrooms firstRaw mushrooms shed a great deal of water into the sauce and slacken it. Sauté the dice in butter until the moisture has driven off, then fold them in.
- Egg beaten with oilThe teaspoon or so of oil in the egg wash is deliberate — it helps the crumbs adhere and gives a smoother crust. For a sturdier coating, dust the shaped croquettes in flour first, then egg, then crumbs, and chill again before frying.
- Frying time is much shorter than statedFrying time is shorter than stated -- The recipe's ten minutes presumably covers the whole panful rather than a single croquette. In fat at 350-375°F, and with everything inside already cooked, croquettes of this size take two to three minutes to colour. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- The hot napkinA folded linen napkin on the serving dish absorbed frying fat and kept the croquettes from sitting in it. A rack, or paper under a warmed dish, does the same job.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb — were prized in nineteenth-century cookery for their mild flavour and delicate texture, and they appear all through Victorian and Edwardian books in far more forms than most modern cooks would recognise: larded and braised, in patties, in vol-au-vents, and here chopped into croquettes. The croquette itself is French, the name from croquer, to crunch, and the technique reached British kitchens as part of the broad nineteenth-century adoption of French method; its practical virtue in a large household was that it turned yesterday's expensive braised sweetbread into a fresh-looking entrée without waste. The croquette is in any case a formula rather than a single dish — master the stiff binding sauce and the same procedure carries chicken, fish, game or rice.