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Croquettes (Take cold fowl or fresh meat)
Take cold fowl or fresh meat of any kind, with slices of fat ham; chop together very fine, add one-half as much stale bread grated, salt and pepper, grated nutmeg, one tablespoonful catsup, one teaspoonful made mustard, and lump of butter size of an egg. Mix well together till it resembles meat; mould them into cakes, dip into well beaten yolk of an egg, cover thickly with grated bread. Fry a light brown.--Mrs. F. D.
Croquettes.
Boil or roast a turkey, chop the meat as fine as possible. Mix eight beaten eggs with the meat, add one quart of milk, one-quarter pound butter, salt and pepper, a little mace.
Stew all together for a few minutes, then take it off to cool and make into little cone shapes. Roll each one into pounded crackers and drop in boiling lard till a light brown.-Mrs. M. E. L. W., Md.
Two contributed croquette recipes, printed back to back under one heading. The first is a straightforward chopped-meat cake; the second is a turkey custard that has to set before it can be shaped at all.
- The hinge: chill the second mixture hardEight eggs, a quart of milk and a quarter pound of butter stewed with chopped turkey will not hold a cone shape while warm. Cook it until it is thick enough to mound on the spoon, spread it in a shallow pan, and refrigerate several hours or overnight before forming.
- Lump of butter size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cookbooks used the egg as a standard volume unit for butter and lard.
- Made mustardPrepared wet mustard, not dry powder. Any plain smooth mustard works; the period version was mustard flour let down with vinegar or water.
- CatsupIn an 1870s Virginia kitchen this could have been mushroom, walnut or oyster catsup as well as tomato; the book gives receipts for several. Mushroom ketchup will taste closer to the period than modern sweetened tomato ketchup.
- Pounded crackersCracker crumbs from hard water crackers, crushed fine with a rolling pin. Unsalted saltines or panko both work; cracker crumbs brown faster and darker than fresh breadcrumbs, so watch the fat temperature.
- Grated stale breadDry breadcrumbs, made by grating a stale loaf on a box grater. "One-half as much" means half the volume of the chopped meat, which produces a firm, quite bready cake.
- Boiling lardDeep-frying temperature, 350-365F. Lard was the default frying fat; any neutral fat with a high smoke point behaves the same. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below 340F, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
- Frying the first version"Fry a light brown" gives no depth or timing; shallow-frying in an inch or so of fat, turning once, works. If the meat used is cold cooked fowl or roast, you are only browning the crust; if raw meat is used, the cakes must be fried until cooked through.
- YieldThe first recipe scales to whatever cold meat you have; a pound of chopped meat makes about eight cakes. The second, built on a whole turkey, is a large-household quantity and is easily quartered.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by "two hundred and fifty of Virginia's noted housewives," prints contributions largely as they arrived, which is why two unrelated croquette methods sit under a single heading, each signed only with initials. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and croquettes appear in American cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century as part of a broader borrowing of French kitchen economy: a way to turn Sunday's roast or the remains of a Christmas turkey into something that looked deliberate at table. The chopped fat ham in the first recipe is characteristically Virginian -- cured pork seasons a great many dishes in the book, and it supplies the fat that cold roast fowl lacks.