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Sauce for Croquette Mixtures
3 tablespoons butter 5 tablespoons flour 1 cup stock or milk salt and pepper celery salt lemon juice few drops onion juice Melt butter; add flour, seasonings and milk. Cook until thick. This sauce is sufficient to thicken two cups of meat, for all kinds of croquettes. It may be varied by adding two egg yolks or one egg. 2 cups chicken meat
This is a panada — a deliberately stiff white sauce whose only job is to hold chopped meat together firmly enough to shape, breadcrumb and fry. Read it as a binder, not a sauce to pour.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe mixture must be spread on a plate, covered and refrigerated until cold and firm, at least two hours and preferably overnight. Croquettes shaped from warm mixture are apt to burst in the fat, a common failure with this style of recipe.
- The flour is not a misprintFive tablespoons flour to three of butter is heavier than a standard roux on purpose. The paste will look dry and crumbly before the liquid goes in; it thickens to something closer to stiff mashed potato than to gravy.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a corner of a cloth. A pinch of onion powder or a teaspoon of very finely grated onion does the same work.
- Adding the eggsIf you use the yolks or whole egg, take the pan off the heat first, beat a spoonful of the hot sauce into the egg, then return it all and cook a minute more without boiling. Added straight to a boiling pan they scramble.
- Unspecified seasoningNo quantities are given for salt, pepper, celery salt or lemon juice. Start with 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon celery salt and a teaspoon of lemon juice for the full cup of liquid, and taste — the binder must be seasoned assertively because the meat is not.
- Stock or milkStock gives a savourier result for chicken, veal or fish; milk gives a milder, whiter croquette. A half-and-half mixture is a reasonable compromise, and cold-diluted homemade stock is fine here since everything is cooked through.
- YieldTwo cups of chopped cooked meat plus this sauce makes roughly a pound and a quarter of mixture, or about twelve small cone-shaped croquettes — four servings as an entrée.
- If you go on to fryRoll in fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again, and rest the coated croquettes in the refrigerator before frying at 375F for two to three minutes. The interior is already cooked; you are only browning the crust.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it extends well beyond confectionery into a full general household manual. A recipe like this one — a single master binder, cross-referenced for "all kinds of croquettes" — is characteristic of the cooking-school tradition that Fannie Farmer had made the New England standard a decade earlier: level measurements, a formula rather than a dish, and the expectation that the cook would supply the variations herself. Croquettes themselves came into American middle-class kitchens from French practice, the name from croquer, to crunch, and they were prized partly for economy, since they turned the remains of a boiled fowl or a roast into something that could be sent to table looking deliberate.