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Rice and Tomato Croquettes
Cook two tablespoons chopped onion in two tablespoons butter five minutes; add one tablespoon red pepper, sprig parsley, four cloves, and one and one half cups tomato; cook five minutes. Add one cup water or chicken stock, pour into double boiler, add one half cup washed rice, and cook until rice is tender and liquid absorbed. Season with salt, pepper and paprika; add two egg yolks and four tablespoons grated cheese. fat.
Shape, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep
A rice pilaf bound with egg yolk and cheese, then breaded and deep-fried — the same logic as an arancino. Note that the last line of the original is garbled in the printing: the words "fry in deep fat" have been split, and the mixture must be cooled before it can be shaped at all.
- Chill before shapingThe recipe never says to cool the rice, but a warm egg-and-cheese mixture will not hold a croquette shape and will burst in the fat. Spread it on a plate, refrigerate at least two hours or overnight, then form.
- "One tablespoon red pepper"This most likely means chopped sweet red pepper (about a tablespoon of dice) rather than ground hot pepper; a tablespoon of cayenne would be inedible, and the recipe seasons separately with salt, pepper and paprika.
- Fish out the clovesFour whole cloves are there to perfume the tomato. Remove them before the rice goes in, or someone bites one.
- Rice choiceUse a short or medium grain (arborio, carnaroli, or plain short-grain white). Long-grain and parboiled rice stay separate and will not bind. There is about two and a half cups of liquid here for half a cup of raw rice, so much of it reduces away rather than being absorbed.
- The double boilerIt keeps the rice from scorching during a long slow absorption. A heavy saucepan on the lowest burner setting, lid on, will do the same in appreciably less time; check for tenderness rather than trusting a clock.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a 1907 American book means a hard grating cheese — Parmesan or a dry aged American cheese. Four tablespoons is about 1 oz.
- Breading and fryingCrumb, egg, crumb, as written, gives a shell that holds. Fry at 375F, a few at a time, two to three minutes until deep gold; the interior is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust.
- YieldAbout eight to ten croquettes, enough for four as an entrée course or six as a side. Best eaten within minutes of frying.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American entrée course from the 1880s through the 1920s — a way to turn a cupful of cooked starch or minced meat into something that arrived at table looking composed. Walter Lowney's company sold chocolate, and Lowney's Cook Book (compiled by Maria Willett Howard, 1907) was a promotional volume, which is why it ranges far past confectionery into full menu planning: a household that trusted the book for its cocoa would trust it for dinner. The tomato-and-rice filling bound with yolk and grated cheese invites comparison with the Sicilian arancino, though any direct line of descent is speculative, and it is tempting to read it as one of the ways Italian cooking may have entered American cookbooks at the time — as technique rather than as attribution. The double boiler is ubiquitous in this period's recipes, and one plausible explanation is kitchens where coal ranges gave uneven, hard-to-lower heat.