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Kromeskis à la Russe
Make some mixture as for Darioles (page 90), and set by to get quite cold. When cold make it up into small rissoles, like a cork, and roll each in a piece of fat bacon or ham, and dip into batter and fry a nice light brown. Serve with fried parsley on a napkin.
A Victorian entrée that is essentially a croquette in a bacon overcoat. Everything depends on the filling being cold and stiff enough to handle, and the original assumes you have already read the dariole recipe on the preceding pages.
- The cross-referenced mixtureThe dariole filling is typically a salpicon: finely diced cooked meat, sweetbread, game or fish bound with a very thick white sauce, seasoned and often enriched with egg yolk. However it is made on page 90, it needs to be stiff enough to hold a shape when cold, not a pourable sauce.
- Cold is the hingeSpread the mixture no more than an inch deep on a buttered tray and chill it several hours, or overnight. A filling that is merely cool will burst its bacon and batter in the fat and empty itself into the pan.
- "Like a cork"That means a short cylinder about an inch and a half long and an inch across, flat at both ends — roughly 1 oz of mixture each. A pound of filling gives 14 to 16 kromeskis, enough for four as an entrée.
- The baconYou want unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta sliced very thin, stretched with the back of a knife and wrapped once around the barrel so the ends just overlap. Thick modern supermarket rashers will not cook through in the time the batter takes to colour.
- The batterA typical period frying batter is flour slaked with tepid water or light beer and a spoonful of oil, rested an hour, with a stiffly whisked egg white folded in at the last moment. It should coat the back of a spoon and no more.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 350–375°F. Lower and the batter drinks fat; hotter and the outside browns before the centre is heated through. Fry three or four at a time and drain on paper.
- Fried parsleyCurly parsley, thoroughly dry, dropped into the same fat for 20 to 30 seconds until it stops hissing and turns brilliant green. Wet leaves will make the fat erupt, so blot them well and stand back.
- Serving on a napkinA folded linen napkin on the dish absorbed the fat and kept the fried food from sweating. A paper-lined warm platter does the same job; serve at once, as these go soft within minutes.
Kromeskis appear on British and French menus from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and the name is generally traced to the Polish kromka, a small slice — the dish is usually credited to Polish or Russian cookery. In French kitchens it was written cromesquis, and Escoffier is said to have distinguished Russian, Polish and French versions by their wrapping, though the divisions are less tidy than that suggests. What distinguishes the kromeski from an ordinary croquette is precisely that jacket of fat bacon between the filling and the batter, which bastes the interior as it fries. In a book of this kind the dish also served a practical end: it was a handsome and clearly labelled way to use up the trimmings of yesterday's roast fowl or sweetbreads without the table ever being told so.