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Meat Croquettes
Any nice cold meat when nicely minced will make good croquettes, especially veal. Take about one-quarter loaf bread, well soaked in water and squeezed dry; mix with the minced meat about one dessertspoonful chopped parsley, one dessert-spoonful ground ginger, three eggs, a pinch of ground mace, pepper and salt, roll them into egg-shaped balls; have ready two or three eggs well beaten, in one plate, and flour in another; first roll in the flour, then in the egg, fry in boiling drippings; serve hot.--Mrs. T.
A leftovers recipe of the kind that fills the back pages of Virginia household books: cold roast meat, bread as binder, and a spice mix that reads oddly strong to modern palates. A few conversions and one judgment call make it workable.
- A dessertspoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, conventionally 2 teaspoons. That is the measure to use for the parsley.
- The gingerTwo teaspoons of ground ginger in a small batch of croquettes will dominate everything. Mace is a common forcemeat spice in books of this period, and ginger turns up in some hands, but if you want the meat to taste of meat, start with half a teaspoon and adjust.
- "One-quarter loaf"Genuinely ambiguous: household loaves of the period varied a good deal in size and density, and were often larger than a modern sandwich loaf. The recipe gives no weight of meat either, so this is guesswork: assuming about a pound of minced meat, roughly 3 to 4 ounces of stale crumb, soaked and wrung out, is a workable ratio.
- Squeezed dry means dryWring the soaked bread hard in a cloth or between your palms. Wet panade plus three eggs gives a mixture too slack to hold an egg shape, and the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- Flour then egg, and nothing afterThe original coating is flour and egg only, with no crumb. It fries to a thin, slightly omelette-like skin rather than a crust. If you want the crisp shell most people expect, finish with dry breadcrumbs after the egg.
- Boiling drippingsBeef or pork drippings at 350-375F, deep enough to half-submerge the croquettes. Any neutral oil works; drippings are what gives the period flavour. Turn once and drain on paper.
- Chill before fryingNot in the original, but half an hour in the refrigerator firms the mixture and makes the egg-shape hold. Chilled croquettes also brown before their centres overheat and split.
- The meat should be properly cold"Any nice cold meat" assumes meat cooked that day or the day before and kept cool. Use refrigerated cooked meat, and fry the croquettes through to hot in the centre rather than just browning the outside.
- YieldA pound of minced meat with this quantity of bread and egg makes about ten to twelve egg-shaped croquettes, enough for four as a main course with a sauce or gravy.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of recipes signed with initials like this one, and croquettes are exactly the sort of dish such a book needed: a way to bring Monday's cold roast back to the table looking deliberate. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and croquettes came into American cookbooks as a genteel name for the older English practice of rechauff he heheavy hand with ginger and mace is the older tradition showing through: those spices had been standard in English and colonial meat puddings and sausage meats long before French terminology reached the South.