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Veal Croquettes
2 lbs. cooked veal chopped very 1 large slice bread (without fine Yolk 2 eggs well beaten Butter size of ½ egg crust) boiled in milk enough to moisten it thoroughly.
Mix all with the meat. Season with salt, pepper, a bit of nutmeg, a little grated lemon peel, a few drops of lemon juice and a little parsley. When the mixture is cold, mold into croquettes and roll in cracker dust and fry like doughnuts. This makes about 28 or 30 balls. Mrs. Graeff.
The original was set in two narrow columns and the lines have run together; read it as a list of four ingredients — chopped cooked veal, a milk-soaked slice of bread, two egg yolks, and a lump of butter — bound, seasoned, chilled, shaped and deep-fried.
- Untangling the ingredient list"Butter size of 12 egg" is probably a typesetting collision for "butter size of ½ egg," which by the usual period reckoning is somewhere between 1 and 2 tablespoons. "1 large slice bread (without crust) boiled in milk" is the panade that holds everything together.
- Chop, do not grind"Chopped very fine" means knife-chopped or run briefly in a food processor with pulses. Meat pushed through a grinder plate turns pasty and the croquettes come out dense rather than light.
- The hinge: chill it hard"When the mixture is cold" is the whole recipe. Warm or merely cool forcemeat slumps in the fat and bursts. Spread it in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least two hours, ideally overnight, before shaping.
- Cracker dustCrushed soda crackers or unsalted saltines rolled to a coarse powder. Modern dried breadcrumbs work, but cracker crumbs brown faster and darker, so watch the colour. For a sturdier crust, dip the shaped croquettes in beaten whole egg before the crumbs.
- "Fry like doughnuts"Deep fat, not a shallow pan. Aim for 365–375F and fry in small batches for two to three minutes, until deep gold. Everything inside is already cooked; you are only crisping the shell and heating the centre.
- Seasoning amountsNone are given. For 2 lb of meat, start with 1½ teaspoons salt, ½ teaspoon pepper, a scant ⅛ teaspoon grated nutmeg, the zest of half a lemon, a teaspoon of juice and two tablespoons chopped parsley. Fry one test croquette and adjust before shaping the rest.
- Yield and servingTwenty-eight to thirty small balls, so eight to ten as a luncheon dish. Croquettes of this period were often served with a plain cream sauce or a wedge of lemon; they are also good at room temperature.
Croquettes were the standard solution to cooked meat left over from a large roast or a boiled joint, and church and club cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are full of them — veal, chicken, salmon, rice. Veal is mild, pale, and improved by exactly the seasonings listed here, and nutmeg and lemon peel are often said to pair well with it. The instruction to "fry like doughnuts" tells you something about the kitchen it came from: a deep kettle of fat was already a weekly fixture, so no further explanation was needed. The attribution to Mrs. Graeff is typical of the subscription cookbook, which printed its members' names beside their best dishes.