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Macaroni Croquettes
Ingredients.
Two ounces of well-cooked Macaroni.
Two ounces of chopped Ham.
Half an ounce of Flour Half an ounce of Butter Panada.
Half a gill of Stock } One ounce of Parmesan.
This entry is ingredients only, in the shorthand of a late-Victorian cookery school where the method for croquettes was taught once and then assumed. The quantities are tiny, and the whole thing hinges on the panada.
- Half a gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is 2 1/2 fl oz, about 5 tablespoons. That is a very small amount of liquid against half an ounce each of flour and butter, which is the point: it is meant to make a stiff paste, not a sauce.
- PanadaThe bracket joining flour, butter and stock marks them as one item, a panada: the butter and flour cooked together, the stock added, then the paste beaten over heat until it leaves the sides of the pan in a mass. It is the glue that holds the macaroni and ham together, and if it is loose the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- Well-cooked macaroniNot al dente. The macaroni should be soft enough to cut into short lengths or small dice without shattering, then drained thoroughly and left to cool so it does not thin the panada with steam.
- Weights, not volumesTwo ounces is about 55 g. Cooked macaroni, chopped ham and grated Parmesan should each be weighed rather than measured by cup, since 1 oz of Parmesan is roughly 1/3 cup grated and easily overshot.
- The missing stepsThe method is not printed. A croquette mixture of this kind is bound with the hot panada, seasoned, spread on a plate and chilled until firm, shaped into small cylinders or cork shapes, then floured, egged and crumbed and fried in deep fat until golden, two to three minutes. The frying temperature is not given in the book; 350-375F is a modern equivalent for fat hot enough to colour the crumb at once.
- Ham and stockUse a cooked ham with some fat in it and a light veal or chicken stock. A modern cube-based stock is too salty here, given that the ham and Parmesan are both already salt.
- YieldThese quantities make about six small croquettes, enough for two or three as a savoury or first course. They scale up cleanly.
- Filed under FishThere is no fish in it. Croquettes of this kind sat alongside fish croquettes as small fried entrees, which may explain the placement.
Croquettes came into English high-class cookery from the French kitchen, where the technique is simply a stiff binding paste, a chopped filling, and a crumb coating that seals everything before it meets hot fat. Macaroni with ham and Parmesan is the frugal end of that repertoire: cooked pasta left from another dish, a scrap of ham, and enough cheese to give it savour, turned into something that could go to table in the small-dish part of a formal dinner or as a savoury after the sweet. The ingredients-only format, with the flour, butter and stock bracketed as a single panada, is the style of training-school cookery books, in which pupils learned the standard preparations by name and the printed recipe only had to give the proportions. Macaroni in British cookery of the period was generally paired with Parmesan and often treated as a savoury.