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Cake Croquettes
Crumble and sift enough stale cake to make 1 pint of fine crumbs. Cover with 1 cupful of milk and soak for an hour. Put over the fire and stir until boiling hot then add 2 beaten egg yolks. When well mixed take off, add 2 teaspoonfuls of vanilla and turn on a shallow dish to cool. Mold in balls or cylinders, dip in slightly beaten egg, roll in fine crumbs and fry golden brown in deep, smoking hot fat. Serve with a hard sauce.
A thrift dessert built from cake scraps: a thick custard-bound paste, breaded and deep fried. The whole thing hinges on getting the mixture cold and stiff enough to shape.
- Quantities in plain termsA pint of fine crumbs is 2 cups, loosely packed — use stale plain cake, sponge or pound cake being ideal. Iced or heavily fruited cake will scorch and weep in the fat.
- Chill, do not merely cool"Turn on a shallow dish to cool" means spread it thin so it cools quickly; for shaping it needs to be firm all through, which in practice means chilling it well. A warm or soft paste will burst in the fryer and fill the pan with cake.
- Cook the yolks properlyThe recipe adds the yolks to the boiling-hot mixture over the fire and takes it off as soon as they are well mixed. If the paste stays slack, a little further stirring over low heat until it coats the spoon will help it mold.
- Frying temperature"Deep, smoking hot fat" was judged by sight or by a bread-cube test; a workable modern equivalent is 365–375F. Any hotter and the crumb coating browns before the center warms; much cooler and the croquettes soak fat.
- CoatingDip in beaten egg loosened with a teaspoon of water, then press into dry fine crumbs, and let the coated pieces rest in the refrigerator 20 minutes so the crust sets before frying.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce — creamed butter beaten with powdered sugar and flavored with vanilla or brandy, served cold so it melts over the hot croquette. Allow about 4 tablespoons butter to 3/4 cup sugar.
- VanillaTwo teaspoons is generous by modern standards for this volume. Start with one and taste the cooled paste.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 croquettes, serving four. Fry in batches of three or four so the fat temperature holds.
Croquettes were one of the great workhorses of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cooking — anything bound with a thick sauce or custard, chilled, breaded and fried could be sent to table looking deliberate rather than salvaged. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch. Sweet versions like this one belong to a broader family of stale-cake economies that fill the dessert chapters of low-cost cookery books: brown Betties, trifles and charlottes all exist partly to use up cake and bread that has gone dry in a household without refrigeration or plastic wrap. That a book of low cost recipes still calls for deep fat and a butter-and-sugar hard sauce suggests that in this period fat and sugar may have been the cheap part; it was the flour, eggs and time already spent on the original cake that no cook would willingly waste.