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Bean Croquettes
Soak and boil either red or white beans until very tender. Drain, put 1 pint through a fine sieve. Add the beaten yolks of 2 eggs, salt and pepper to taste, 1 teaspoonful of melted butter, 1 teaspoonful of onion juice and 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Mold into little cakes or croquettes, dip each in slightly beaten egg, roll in fine dry bread crumbs and fry golden brown in smoking hot fat.
A straightforward bean croquette that depends entirely on how dry the purée is. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: dry the puréeA pint of sieved beans straight from the pot holds too much water and the cakes will slump and burst in the fat. Cook the mash in a dry pan over medium heat, stirring, until it pulls away from the sides and holds a shape when mounded on a spoon.
- QuantitiesA pint of sieved beans is about 2 cups, which comes from roughly 1 cup dried beans or two 15-oz cans, drained and rinsed. The mixture makes about 10 to 12 small croquettes, enough for four as a side or three as a main.
- A fine sieveThe original means forcing cooked beans through a wire sieve with a wooden spoon to leave the skins behind. A food mill or ricer does the same job; a food processor keeps the skins in, which is coarser but perfectly good.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid and pulp that collects, about a teaspoon. Minced raw onion is not a substitute here — it stays crunchy and works the croquette apart.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot fat" is hotter than you want with a bean batter; hold the oil at 350–365F so the crumb browns in two to three minutes while the inside heats through. Fry in batches of three or four to keep the temperature up.
- Chilling helpsThe recipe does not say to rest the mixture, but half an hour in the refrigerator after shaping and breading makes the croquettes far easier to handle and much less likely to split.
- SeasoningBeans absorb a great deal of salt. Season the purée assertively and taste before the raw yolks go in, since it will taste flat if you judge it only after frying.
Bean croquettes belong to a whole family of "made dishes" built to give inexpensive protein the shape and manners of a meat course. The croquette proper was meat or fish bound with thick sauce, and dried beans, cheap and shelf-stable, were the obvious economy substitute. The same trick appears to have been common in low-cost cookery, and wartime meat conservation campaigns, when household bulletins urged beans, peas and lentils as "meat substitutes," gave it extra force. The details here are typical of genteel touches on a frugal base: the beans are pushed through a sieve to remove the skins, and flavor comes from onion juice rather than chopped onion, both signs of a kitchen that wanted a smooth, refined result from the plainest possible ingredient.