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Sweetbread and Mushroom Croquettes
1 cup mushrooms cut in small pieces salt and pepper 1 cup cold cooked sweetbreads cut in dice lemon juice and onion juice 1 cup Croquette Sauce Sauté mushrooms in butter; add seasonings, sauce.
Shape, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry.
A short entrée recipe that assumes you already have two things on hand: cooked sweetbreads and the book's Croquette Sauce. Both need attention before the recipe will work.
- Croquette SauceThis is the book's very thick panada-style white sauce, using a far higher proportion of butter and flour to liquid than a pouring sauce, and cooked until it pulls away from the pan; turn back to the book's own Croquette Sauce for the quantities. An ordinary pouring béchamel will not hold the filling together and the croquettes may burst in the fat.
- The hinge: chill the mixture hardThe recipe says "shape" as though the mixture were ready. Spread it in a shallow pan, cover, and refrigerate at least 2 hours or overnight until firm enough to cut. Warm croquette mixture cannot be breaded and will leak.
- Cooked sweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads (thymus or pancreas) must be soaked in several changes of cold water, membrane peeled, then simmered 15–20 minutes in acidulated water and pressed under a weight until cold. Order them ahead from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock them.
- Mushrooms give off waterSauté over fairly high heat until the liquid has evaporated and the pan is dry again, or that moisture will thin the sauce. Two tablespoons of butter is enough for a cup of mushrooms.
- "Lemon juice and onion juice"Unmeasured in the original. A teaspoon of lemon juice and half a teaspoon of onion juice (grate an onion and squeeze) suits this quantity; both are there to lift a very rich, bland filling.
- Crumbs, egg and crumbsThe order given is correct and deliberate — dry crumbs first so the egg has something to grip, then egg beaten with a tablespoon of water, then crumbs again. Rest the breaded croquettes in the refrigerator 30 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; books of this period judged the fat by how fast it browned a cube of bread. Deep fat at about 375F (190C) works, with the croquettes fried 2–3 minutes until deep brown. The filling is already cooked, so the only job is to heat it through and colour the crust; cooler fat means a grease-soaked coating.
- YieldThe three cups of ingredients cook down somewhat, but should still give roughly 10 to 12 croquettes — about four servings as a first course or a light lunch with a green vegetable.
Croquettes of this kind were a staple of the American entrée course in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookery schools taught them as a set exercise: a stiff panada sauce, a cup of something chopped, chill, shape, crumb, fry. Sweetbreads and mushrooms made a genteel pairing — both were expensive, both were pale and mild, and both were understood to signal a good table rather than a thrifty one. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and written by Maria Willett Howard, follows the New England cooking-school style closely, which is why the recipe reads as a bare formula: the reader was expected to know the technique and to turn back a few pages for the sauce. Sweetbreads have largely disappeared from home kitchens, a shift usually attributed to the industrialisation of meatpacking and the decline of the domestic market for offal.