Home › Soups › Walnut Croquettes
Walnut Croquettes
1 pint stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup chopped walnuts 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sage 1 egg Thick cream sauce or milk gravy Mix the ingredients, then mix with them enough of the cream sauce to make the mixture as soft as can be handled. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg white. Shape into croquettes, dip in a mixture of one egg yolk and one tablespoon water beaten together, then roll in zwieback crumbs. Bake ten or fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Serve with brown sauce to which a few peas have been added.
A baked nut croquette of the kind that filled the meatless middle of the plate in early twentieth-century health-reform cooking. The mixture is bound almost entirely by bread and sauce, so its texture depends on how thick that sauce is.
- The hinge: sauce consistencyA thick cream sauce here means a heavy bechamel — roughly 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked until it mounds on the spoon. Thin sauce or plain milk will give a mixture that slumps in the oven rather than holding a croquette shape.
- One egg, two jobsThe single egg is separated: the stiffly beaten white goes into the mixture, the yolk is thinned with water for the coating. Read the ingredient line as one egg total, not two.
- Hot ovenTake "hot" as roughly 400-450F. The croquettes are already cooked through in effect, so the oven is only setting the shape and browning the crumb coat.
- Zwieback crumbsZwieback is bread sliced and baked a second time until dry and lightly browned. Crushed rusks, melba toast or plain dried breadcrumbs stand in; avoid sweetened commercial teething biscuits, which will scorch.
- Stale bread crumbsA pint means soft crumbs from day-old bread, loosely measured — about 3 1/2 to 4 ounces. These are not the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters, which would absorb far more sauce.
- Sage and saltOne teaspoon of dried sage in this quantity is assertive by modern taste; rubbed sage is milder than ground. A full teaspoon of salt is reasonable given the bulk of unsalted bread, but the cream sauce and brown sauce both add more.
- Browning without fryingBaked croquettes brown unevenly unless helped. Brush or spray the crumbed surfaces lightly with oil or melted butter and turn them once partway through.
- YieldMakes roughly eight croquettes, enough for three or four as a main course with the sauce and peas.
Nut croquettes belong to the vegetarian cookery that grew out of nineteenth-century American health reform, where chopped walnuts, peanuts and bread crumbs were assembled into cutlets, loaves and roasts meant to occupy the place of meat on the plate without imitating it too closely. The method is essentially that of a classic croquette — a stiff sauce-bound mixture, egg-washed, crumbed and browned — with nuts supplying fat and richness. Baking rather than deep-frying reflects the same reform outlook, which distrusted fried food, and zwieback appears often in these books as a virtuous, thoroughly baked substitute for fresh bread. The brown sauce with a few peas dropped in is a period touch: a small garnish of colour on an otherwise pale dish.