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Sweet Potato Croquettes
Boil some sweet potatoes, then drain, peel and mash. To 1 pint beat in 1 tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper to taste. As soon as they can be handled form into croquettes, dip in egg and crumbs and fry brown in deep, smoking hot fat.
A brief, workable formula that assumes you already know how croquettes behave. The only real difficulty is moisture: sweet potatoes carry far more water than the white potatoes croquette recipes usually rely on.
- A pint of mashed potatoThe original measures the mash by volume, not weight. A pint of mashed sweet potato is somewhere between 1 and 1 1/2 lb depending on how firmly it is packed, so allow around 1 1/2 lb of whole potatoes.
- Bake rather than boil, if you canBoiling waterlogs the flesh and the mash will slump instead of holding a shape. If you do boil, cook them whole in their skins and let them steam dry in the pan for a few minutes after draining.
- Shape them warm"As soon as they can be handled" is the hinge. Warm mash holds together; cold sweet potato mash turns sticky and slack, and the croquettes split in the fat. Shape while warm, then chill the formed croquettes 30 minutes before breading if you want insurance.
- Egg and crumbsThe recipe skips the first step most cooks now use: dust the croquette in flour before the egg. Sweet potato is wet enough that egg alone slides off. Beat the egg with a spoonful of water or milk so it coats thinly.
- "Smoking hot fat"Period cooks judged fat by the first wisp of smoke; in lard or drippings that point falls somewhere in the region of 350-375F, varying with the fat and how often it has been used. Use a thermometer and hold 350-365F; sweet potato browns fast because of its sugar, and much above 375F the crust darkens before the inside is hot.
- Frying timeTwo to three minutes, turning once, is enough — everything inside is already cooked. Fry in batches of three or four so the fat temperature does not crash, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
- Seasoning"Salt and pepper to taste" is the whole seasoning, which is truer to the book's purpose than to modern palates. A pinch of nutmeg or mace, or a little grated orange zest, sits well with sweet potato without adding cost.
- YieldA pint of mash gives about twelve croquettes the size of a small egg — four servings as a side dish.
Croquettes earned their place in cheap cookery because they turn leftovers into something that looks like a made dish: the name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form spread through American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century as ranges and reliable deep fat became common in ordinary kitchens. Sweet potatoes were a natural candidate in a low-cost book in the South and the mid-Atlantic, and starchy enough to bind with nothing more than a spoonful of butter and an egg wash.