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Sweet Potato Croquettes
1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup sweet potatoes, baked 2 tablespoons milk 3 tablespoons Dromedary Cocoanut 1 egg, beaten Fine bread crumbs Rice potatoes, measure them, add butter, cocoanut soaked in milk and one-fourth of the egg. Shape and roll in bread crumbs, brush over with remainder of egg, and toss in crumbs. Fry in smoking hot fat or bake to a light brown in a hot oven. Serve hot.
A tiny recipe from a promotional pamphlet — half a cup of potato makes about four small croquettes, so scale it up by four or six for a side dish. The main adjustments are the coconut, the fat temperature, and getting the mixture cold before you shape it.
- Dromedary CocoanutA packaged shredded dried coconut. Unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut is the closer match; sweetened bagged flake will push these toward dessert.
- Soaking the coconutThe two tablespoons of milk are there to rehydrate the coconut, not to loosen the potato. Let it sit five to ten minutes until the shreds are soft, then add the whole thing, milk included.
- Bake the potatoes, don't boilThe instruction is deliberate. Baked sweet potato is drier and denser, and a boiled one gives a wet mixture that slumps in the fat. Bake at 400F until collapsing, then scoop out the flesh and rice it hot.
- A hot ovenFor the baked version, roughly 425F on a greased sheet, turning once, until browned. For frying, 375F is a workable modern target; "smoking hot" assumes the fats of the period rather than a measured temperature.
- The egg, dividedA quarter of the beaten egg binds the mixture; the rest is the wash. Beat the whole egg first, then measure out a quarter of it (roughly two teaspoons) for the potato and keep the remainder for brushing.
- Chill before shapingThe recipe skips this and it is the hinge. Spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate 30 minutes to an hour — warm sweet potato croquettes burst open in hot fat.
- Double crumbingCrumb, egg wash, crumb again, as written. The second coat is what keeps the fat out and the potato in; let the finished croquettes rest ten minutes so the crust sets.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; half a cup of potato will make only three or four small croquettes, a single serving. Six times the recipe would fill a platter for six as a side with ham or roast fowl.
This comes from a manufacturer's recipe booklet, and it does what those booklets were built to do: find a way into a course where the product does not obviously belong. Dromedary, a brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, sold shredded coconut and dates in packages at a time when the alternative was cracking and grating a whole nut, and its pamphlets pushed coconut well past cake and pie into soups, salads and vegetable dishes. The croquette itself needs no promoting; it was one of the workhorses of the American cooking-school era, a way of turning small quantities of leftover starch or meat into something that arrived at the table looking composed. Sweet potato and coconut both carry the sweetness that tables of the period liked alongside roast pork or fowl, and the pairing turns up in candied and marshmallow-topped sweet potato dishes of the same decades.