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Cream Croquettes
4 tablespoons cornstarch 4 cup cold milk cup sugar 2 eggs cup chopped almonds 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix cornstarch and cold milk, add hot milk, and cook in double boiler until mixture thickens. Add eggs well beaten, sugar, almonds and vanilla. Cook two minutes. Pour into shallow pan; chill; cut into squares or rounds; dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, fry in hot fat. Drain on brown paper, roll in powdered sugar, and serve. with Lemon Sauce.
A sweet croquette: thick cornstarch pudding, chilled firm, breaded and deep-fried. The text as printed has lost several fraction marks, so read the quantities with care before starting.
- The missing fractions"4 cup cold milk cup sugar" and "cup chopped almonds" are the result of dropped fraction glyphs. Comparable pudding-croquette recipes of the period use about 2 cups milk in total (a quarter-cup of it cold, for slaking the starch), a half-cup sugar and a half-cup almonds; treat those as reconstructions rather than the author's figures.
- The hot milk is unlistedThe ingredient line names only cold milk, but the method calls for hot milk as well. Slake the cornstarch in the cold milk, then whisk it into the remainder scalded.
- The hinge: a very stiff pasteFour tablespoons of cornstarch to roughly two cups of milk is deliberately stiff — far thicker than a pouring custard. If the mixture will not hold a spoon upright when hot, it will slump in the fryer no matter how long it chills.
- Tempering the eggsBeaten eggs stirred straight into a near-boiling starch paste will scramble. Whisk a ladle of the hot mixture into the eggs first, return it to the pan, then give it the specified two minutes over the water bath.
- Chilling timeThe recipe says only "chill"; in practice that means several hours, and overnight is better. Spread the paste no more than three-quarters of an inch deep in the pan so it sets through, and refrigerate uncovered until firm, then cut.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe double coating is not optional padding — it is the only thing between hot fat and a soft pudding. Chill the breaded pieces again for twenty minutes before frying so the shell sets.
- Fat temperatureThe book says only "hot fat". Period cookery-school guidance for frying an already-cooked mixture is fat that browns a bread cube in about forty seconds, roughly 375F. Cooler fat lets the coating absorb grease and the centre soften; hotter and the crust colours before the inside warms. Fry in small batches, a minute or two a side.
- Draining and finishingBrown paper was the period's paper towel; a wire rack over a tray works better and keeps the crust crisp. Roll in powdered sugar only after the surface has stopped steaming, or it dissolves.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield or number of servings, and the quantities are partly reconstructed, so judge the count from the pan. They are meant to go out hot with the Lemon Sauce given elsewhere in the book; any tart fruit sauce answers the same purpose, which is to cut the sweetness.
Fried sweet croquettes were a staple of American dessert cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, an offshoot of the savoury croquette that French-trained cooks and cooking-school teachers had made fashionable: a thick binding paste, chilled, shaped, breaded and fried. Cornstarch made the sweet version cheap and reliable, and it appears in this form under names like cream croquettes, rice croquettes and chocolate croquettes depending on what was folded in. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of turn-of-the-century books issued by food firms to promote their product — which is why the dessert chapter is generous and heavily weighted toward chocolate, vanilla and almonds.