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Fish Croquettes
2 cups cold cooked fish lemon juice and onion juice salt and pepper 1 cup Croquette Sauce 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Mix all ingredients; add more lemon juice if needed. Shape, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, fry in deep fat. One cup tomato may be substituted for the one cup milk or stock in Croquette Sauce.
Rolled Fillets of Flounder with Béchamel Sauce 2 flounders 2 tablespoons butter salt, pepper and cayenne ½ cup cream 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley 4 hard-cooked eggs 1 tablespoon lemon juice 4 lemons Make eight fillets from the flounder. Melt butter; add lemon juice and parsley. Dip fillets in this mixture; roll and skewer fillets; put in baking dish; sprinkle with salt, pepper and cayenne. Cover with cream and cook in oven until tender. Arrange on platter, pour around the fillets Béchamel sauce, and garnish with lemon basket in the center, filled with sauce, yolks of eggs pressed through ricer and whites cut in shape of petals.
Two recipes have run together in this page: the croquettes proper, and a second dish of rolled flounder fillets that follows without a break. Both depend on a Croquette Sauce given elsewhere in the book — a very thick white sauce used as a binder, not a pouring sauce.
- The hinge: the binder must be stiff and coldCroquette Sauce is a panade-thick white sauce, but its proportions are given elsewhere in the book, not here. Mix it with the fish, then spread the mixture on a plate and chill it thoroughly for at least two hours; warm, loose mixture will burst in the fat.
- "Lemon juice and onion juice"No quantity is given. Start with 2 teaspoons lemon juice and 1 teaspoon onion juice — grate an onion and press the pulp — for 2 cups fish, and adjust. Onion juice was a common period way of getting onion flavour without visible pieces.
- Cold cooked fishAny firm white fish or salmon, flaked and picked over for bones. Two cups is about 12 oz cooked, or roughly 1 lb raw. Canned salmon or tuna, well drained, works the way the book intends.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe order in the original is the standard one: dry crumbs first to blot the surface, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again. Chill the coated croquettes again for 20 minutes before frying.
- Deep fat375F. The croquettes are already cooked through, so they need only 2 to 3 minutes to colour and heat. Hotter and the coating darkens before the centre warms; cooler and it absorbs fat.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes, serving four as an entrée in the period sense — a course between fish and roast, not a main dish.
- For the flounder: oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Bake at 375F; eight thin rolled fillets under cream will be done in 18 to 25 minutes, when the fish flakes at the skewer. Flounder overcooks quickly, so check early.
- Cream and "2 flounders"Whole flounder yielding two fillets each side; ask for eight small skinless fillets, about 1 1/2 lb. Half a cup of cream over that much fish is a thin film, not a bath — it reduces to a glaze.
- The garnishSieved yolk is what later books call mimosa; the petal-cut whites are a separate flourish. The lemon basket is a hollowed lemon half with a strip of peel left as a handle; four lemons presumably allows for the basket plus wedges.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its confectionery chapters with a full general household repertoire — which is why a fish entrée sits here at all. The croquette itself is French in name and method, from croquer, to crunch, and it earned its place in American cooking as the respectable way to serve yesterday's fish: bound with a stiff white sauce, coated, and fried so that nothing announced itself as a leftover. Entrée in this book still carries its older meaning, a small made dish served between heavier courses rather than the centre of the meal, which explains the modest yield and the elaborate garnishing of the flounder that follows.