Home › Doughnuts and Crullers › Beef Croquettes
Beef Croquettes
4 cups minced meat 1 egg 4 tablespoons home-made tomato catsup 2 tablespoons salad dressing ⅓ cup Five Roses flour 1 medium-sized onion (chopped).
Mix all together. Moisten with gravy, season to taste. Make into cakes and fry.
A leftover-beef dish from a flour company's promotional cookbook, written for cooks who already knew what a croquette looked like. Two words in the ingredient list need translating before anything else.
- "Minced meat" means cooked beefThis is roast or boiled beef put through a hand mincer, not raw ground beef and certainly not sweet mincemeat. Four cups is roughly 1 1/2 lb of cooked meat, about what is left from a small pot roast. If you start from raw ground beef the mixture will shrink, weep and fall apart, and it would need cooking through to 160F rather than simply browning.
- "Salad dressing" is not bottled dressingIn period Canadian home cooking this means mayonnaise or, more likely, a cooked flour-and-egg boiled dressing. Either works as a binder and a little acid; a modern vinaigrette does not and will loosen the mix.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Manitoba bread flour, the product the book existed to sell. All-purpose flour is a fine substitute at the same 1/3 cup, which is there to bind rather than to build structure.
- Home-made catsupPeriod tomato catsup was thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and cayenne than modern ketchup, and less sweet. Four tablespoons of today's ketchup will read noticeably sugary; cut it with a teaspoon of vinegar if that bothers you.
- The hinge: chill and be sparing with the gravy"Moisten with gravy" invites overshooting. Add it a tablespoon at a time until the mass just holds a shape, then refrigerate 30 minutes before forming. Warm, wet croquette mixture is what makes cakes collapse in the pan.
- FryingShallow-fry in about 1/4 inch of fat at 350-375F, three to four minutes a side, until well crusted. The filling is already cooked, so you are after colour and a firm exterior. A coating of dry breadcrumbs or flour before frying is not in the original but keeps the surface intact.
- Raw onionA medium onion chopped raw stays crunchy and assertive in a cake fried this briefly. Sweating it in butter first, then cooling it, gives a smoother result.
- YieldRoughly ten to twelve cakes, serving four to six. Traditionally sent to table with a brown or tomato sauce and mashed potato.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose Five Roses flour was milled from Manitoba hard wheat and sold across Canada; the book was distributed in enormous numbers to households that bought the flour, and recipes were contributed by users of the brand. That origin explains why a beef croquette specifies its flour by name and why the instructions are so telegraphic — the audience was assumed to be experienced, and the point of the page was the flour. Croquettes themselves come from the French croquer, to crunch, and by the late nineteenth century they were the standard genteel solution to cold roast meat: mince it, bind it, fry it, and serve it as though it had always been intended.