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Croquettes
Two cups of meat minced very fine, one tablespoon of flour, one cup of milk or cream, one egg, one teaspoon of onion juice, one teaspoon of salt, one-fourth teaspoon of pepper, a dash of cayenne, dash of nutmeg. Fry in deep fat and dry on paper in the open oven.
— Mrs. Robert Selden
A village receipt written for cooks who already knew what a croquette was: it lists the contents and assumes you can supply the method. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The hinge: the mixture must set hardCroquettes are bound with a very thick white sauce and then chilled until firm — several hours or overnight in the refrigerator. A warm, soft mixture will burst in the fat and leave you with meat soup.
- The flour is almost certainly shortOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk makes a pouring sauce, not a binder. Period croquette panadas run nearer four tablespoons of flour per cup of liquid, with a roughly equal measure of butter. Take the printed amount as a floor, not a rule, and cook the sauce until it pulls away from the pan in a mass.
- Method, unstatedMelt butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute, add the milk and cook to a stiff paste. Off the heat beat in the egg, then the minced meat and seasonings. Spread on a plate, chill, shape into cylinders or cones, and coat.
- BreadingThe single egg here is a binder for the mixture; a croquette also needs an outer coat. Roll the shaped pieces in fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again, and let them rest 20 minutes so the crust sets.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a chunk in a garlic press. A teaspoon is about what half a small onion yields.
- Deep fat375F is the working temperature. Cooler and the croquettes drink fat; hotter and the crumb blackens before the centre is hot. Croquettes of this kind were made from meat already cooked — the tail of a roast or a boiled fowl — so two to three minutes to colour is enough.
- "Dry on paper in the open oven"Draining on paper in a warm oven with the door ajar keeps the first batch crisp while the rest fry. A rack over a sheet pan at 200F does the same and avoids a soggy underside.
- YieldTwo cups of minced meat makes eight to ten croquettes, enough for four as a main course with a sauce, or six as a first course. Chicken, veal or leftover roast all suit it.
Croquettes were the standard American answer to Monday's cold roast, and they appear widely in community cookbooks of the period — a way of turning the tail end of a joint into something that could be sent to table with a napkin and a sauceboat. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived with the professional French cookery that shaped nineteenth-century American cooking schools; Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries drilled students in the thick panada and the double crumb coating. Village receipts like this one, credited to the contributor under her husband's name, were printed as reminders rather than instructions, which is why the seasonings are given to the quarter-teaspoon while the entire method is compressed into a single sentence. The dash of nutmeg is the giveaway of the older tradition: it was standard in white sauces for meat well into the twentieth century.