Home › Cookery › Croquettes (Have some nice pieces of veal)
Croquettes (Have some nice pieces of veal)
Have some nice pieces of veal or fowl, chopped fine, season with nutmeg, pepper and salt to your taste.
Boil one-half pint milk with one small garlic. Thicken with two tablespoonfuls flour, and one tablespoonful butter.
Let it remain till thoroughly done; stir in the meat and then form the croquettes. Roll in bread crumbs, then the yolk of an egg, then in bread crumbs, and fry a nice brown.-Miss E. P.
Croquettes.
Take cold meat or fresh meat, with grated ham, fat and lean, chopped very fine-add one-half as much stale bread grated, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, one tablespoonful catsup, a lump of butter.
Knead all well together-if not soft enough add cream or gravy. Make in cakes the shape of a pear; dip them in the yolk of an egg beaten, roll in dried bread crumbs, and fry a light brown.-Miss. M. C. L.
Two croquette formulas from different contributors: the first bound with a thick milk sauce, the second with grated stale bread. Both depend on a mixture stiff enough to hold its shape, which is the step neither writer spells out.
- Chill before shapingThe first version is bound with a thick milk sauce, and the mixture is far easier to handle if spread on a plate and chilled until firm — an hour at least, longer is better — before it is formed. Shaped warm, it tends to slump in the fat and burst.
- "One small garlic"This means one clove, not a head. It is meant to perfume the milk; fish it out before thickening unless you want it in the mixture.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With two tablespoons of flour and one of butter you get a very thick white sauce, which is correct here — it is glue, not gravy. "Let it remain till thoroughly done" means cook it several minutes past the point where it thickens so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The meat should be cookedThe first recipe adds the meat to an already-thickened sauce that is on the heat only briefly; the second allows either "cold meat or fresh meat." If you use raw veal or chicken, cook and cool it first rather than relying on the brief fry to bring it to a safe temperature.
- Breading orderAs printed, the first recipe has crumbs, then yolk, then crumbs — the flour-egg-crumb sequence in a different arrangement, and it works. Yolk alone is stiff; beat it with a spoonful of water or milk, or use a whole egg, so it coats evenly.
- Catsup in 1879Catsup at this date may be mushroom or walnut rather than tomato — thin, dark and sharply savoury. A tablespoon of modern tomato ketchup will read sweeter than the recipe may have intended; mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire is a possible substitute.
- Frying"Fry a nice brown" means deep fat at 350–375F, two to three minutes, turning if the croquettes are not submerged. Below that temperature they soak; above it the crumbs colour before the centre is hot.
- The pear shapePear-shaped croquettes appear elsewhere in nineteenth-century cookery, sometimes finished with a bit of macaroni or a clove stuck in as a stalk. Any compact shape fries the same.
- YieldNeither recipe states quantities of meat. Reckon on about a pound of chopped cooked meat to the cup of sauce, which gives ten to twelve croquettes and serves four with a salad.
Croquettes were the great nineteenth-century answer to the cold joint: minced meat, a stiff binding, a crumb crust and hot fat turned Sunday's remains into something that could be sent to table on a napkin with parsley. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the dish is often said to have reached American cookbooks by way of the French-trained kitchens and translated manuals that shaped genteel Southern cooking. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by "two hundred and fifty of Virginia's noted housewives," prints recipes as they were sent in, initialled — which is why two croquettes sit side by side here, one bound with a milk sauce in the French manner and one with grated stale bread in the older English forcemeat tradition.