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Lobster Croquettes
2 cups finely chopped lobster 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon mustard Few grains cayenne 1 cup White Sauce No. 3 Combine in the order given, cool, form into balls, roll in beaten egg and bread crumbs and fry in hot fat. Drain on brown paper.
A standard croquette formula from the Gold Medal book, written for cooks who already knew the sauce numbers by heart. Two things decide whether it works: the thickness of the binding sauce and the temperature of the fat.
- White Sauce No. 3Numbered sauces in books of this kind generally run from thin to thick, and No. 3 is normally the thick, croquette-grade binding sauce; a sauce of that grade is typically in the region of 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked until stiff enough to mound on a spoon. Check the figures against the book's own sauce chapter. A pouring-consistency bechamel will not hold the mixture together and the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- Cool means coldThe mixture has to set right through before it can be shaped; a warm mixture will slump the moment it hits the fat. In practice that means several hours chilled. Chilling the coated balls again before frying is a modern refinement, not something the recipe asks for.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; period cooks commonly judged the kettle with a cube of bread. About 375F works: below that the crumbs soak fat before they set, above it the coating colours before the centre is hot.
- The lobster is already cookedThis calls for meat from a boiled lobster, chopped fine. Everything in the mixture is cooked, so the frying is only to crisp the crust and heat the interior through, two to three minutes.
- MustardA teaspoon of dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard, which would add liquid the binding cannot absorb. Note that the recipe's stated order puts it in with the lobster, before the sauce.
- The egg washBeaten egg alone is thick and drags; loosen it with a tablespoon of water or milk. A crumb, egg, crumb sequence gives a more reliable seal than the single coating the recipe describes.
- DrainingBrown paper meant grocer's wrapping. Use a wire rack over a sheet pan; paper towels trap steam and soften the underside.
- YieldThe mixture comes to roughly three cups, enough for somewhere between a dozen and eighteen golf-ball croquettes, serving four or so as an entree in the period sense of a small made dish served before the roast.
Croquettes belong to the era when a deep kettle of fat was a fixture of the middle-class American kitchen, and when "entrée" still meant a small made dish served before the roast rather than the main event. The technique is French in origin — the name comes from croquer, to crunch — and it was prized in household cookery precisely because it stretched an expensive protein: two cups of lobster, bound with a cup of flour-thickened sauce, feeds a table that a whole lobster apiece would not. The book behind Gold Medal was issued by a flour miller. Its numbered white sauces suggest a useful principle: learn three thicknesses and you can bind, coat and dress most of what the household eats.