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Sweet Potato Croquettes
Boil dry and skin six good-sized sweet potatoes. Mash, add a tablespoonful of butter, a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper. Mix, form into cylinders, dip first in egg and then in bread crumbs and fry in smoking hot fat. Serve with roast meat, poultry or game.
A straightforward croquette that depends almost entirely on how dry the potato is before it is shaped. Everything else is seasoning and technique.
- Boil dry"Boil dry" most likely means cooking the potatoes until the water has gone and the flesh is floury rather than waterlogged. Baking them until tender is one modern alternative that gets a drier flesh; wet mash will burst in the fat.
- QuantitySix good-sized sweet potatoes might come to around 3 lb, though the recipe gives no weight and no yield. A tablespoon of butter to that quantity is a light hand by modern standards.
- Chill before fryingThe original skips it, but shaped cylinders hold together far better after 30 minutes in the refrigerator.
- BreadingDipping straight from mash into egg tends to slide. A pass through flour first, then egg, then crumbs, gives a coat that stays on.
- Smoking hot fatPeriod fats smoked at a lower point than modern refined oils. Aim for 365-375F, measured; oil actually smoking is too hot and the crumb will darken before the inside heats through.
- Fat depthThe recipe names no fat; lard or beef drippings would have been the usual choices. Two to three inches of a neutral oil works, and croquettes should be fried a few at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for this quantity of potato is modest. Taste the mash before shaping, and consider that sweet potatoes take well to a little cayenne, nutmeg or mace, all common in period kitchens.
Croquettes were one of the workhorses of American cooking-school teaching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the technique of binding a soft mixture, shaping it, breading it and deep-frying it was taught as a general method and then applied to fish, chicken, rice, hominy and every mashable vegetable in the pantry. The form comes from French cookery, the name from croquer, to crunch, and the popularity from the fact that it turned leftovers and cheap starches into something that looked composed on the plate. Sweet potatoes were a natural candidate in the United States, where they were abundant, inexpensive and already associated with roast meats and poultry, which is exactly how this recipe directs them to be served.