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Sausage Croquettes (Pounds of meat eggs cup butter)
2 pounds of meat. 4 eggs. 1 cup butter. 1 cup milk.
Add powdered cracker or stale bread crumbs sufficient to thicken, while on the fire. Roll in oblong shapes and fry in lard. Roll the balls in cracker dust before frying.--Mrs. R. K. M.
A terse formula of the kind written for a cook who already knew the dish. The proportions are given; the method has to be inferred, and one point of ambiguity needs settling before you start.
- What the "meat" isThe recipe says only "meat"; the title points to sausage, and in a Virginia book of this period that would most likely mean fresh bulk pork sausage, commonly seasoned with sage and pepper. Two pounds of bulk breakfast sausage is a reasonable substitute; go easy on any additional salt, since commercial sausage is already salted.
- Cook the meat firstThe instruction to add crumbs "while on the fire" means the mixture is heated in a pan. Break the sausage up and cook it through, then work in the eggs, butter, milk and crumbs off direct high heat so the eggs thicken rather than scramble. Frying a raw pork mixture in croquette form gives you a browned crust over an undercooked centre.
- Crumbs "sufficient to thicken"No quantity is given. Add crumbs until the mass holds a shape on the spoon and pulls from the side of the pan; with this much milk, butter and egg it may take a good deal. It firms further as it cools.
- Chill before shapingThe hinge of the recipe. Spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate at least an hour until cold and stiff. Warm croquette paste will not hold the oblong shape and tends to burst in the fat.
- Rolling and coatingThe original says both "roll in oblong shapes" and "roll the balls in cracker dust" — the shape is the cook's choice. For a coating that stays on, roll in crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again; the four eggs in the mixture are structural, not breading, so reserve an extra egg for that.
- Frying mediumLard is still sold and gives the cleanest flavour here, but any fat with a high smoke point works. Deep-fry at 360-375F for 3 to 4 minutes, until the crust is a deep brown; the filling is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring.
- YieldDepends on how large you shape them; a dozen and a half of moderate size would serve six as a breakfast or supper dish. The recipe says nothing about what went alongside.
Croquettes were the standard nineteenth-century answer to cooked meat in small quantity: bind it with a thick panada of milk, butter, egg and crumbs, chill, shape, crumb and fry. American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s are full of them — chicken, veal, oyster, rice — and the technique came into English-language books largely through French cookery, the name from the French croquer, to crunch. What marks this one as Virginian is the meat: fresh sage-heavy country sausage, made at hog-killing time in cold weather and eaten liberally through the winter, so that a household might well have two pounds of it to turn into something more formal than patties. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers and credits them by initial, as here with Mrs. R. K. M. — which accounts for the shorthand style. These were notes passed between women who already knew how a croquette behaved.