Home › Entrées › Veal Croquettes
Veal Croquettes
Cut one pint veal in small pieces; add one tablespoon salt, one quarter teaspoon pepper, one tablespoon lemon juice. Melt three tablespoons butter; add two tablespoons finely minced onion, three tablespoons flour, and three fourths cup milk or veal stock. Boil five minutes. Add two eggs well beaten. Stir constantly until thick. Mix with veal mixture and cool. Shape, allowing a rounding tablespoonful for each croquette. Dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. Serve with or without White Sauce.
A standard croquette formula from the era: cooked meat bound in a very stiff panada, chilled hard, then breaded and deep fried. The recipe assumes you already have cooked veal on hand.
- The veal is already cookedThe veal is almost certainly already cooked -- the recipe gives the meat no cooking of its own, so "one pint veal in small pieces" should be read as cooked veal, leftover roast or braised shoulder, chopped fine. A pint measured this way will weigh anywhere from about ten ounces to a pound depending on how finely it is chopped and how firmly it is packed. Raw veal will not cook through in the fryer.
- Chilling is the hingeThe mixture must be spread on a plate and refrigerated until genuinely firm, at least two hours and preferably overnight. Croquettes shaped from a warm or soft binder burst in the fat and empty themselves into the pan.
- The salt is highA full tablespoon of salt for a pint of meat reads as a lot to modern palates. Start with a teaspoon and a half of table salt and taste the cooled mixture before shaping.
- Boil five minutes, then the eggsThe flour-butter-milk base is cooked hard to drive off raw flour taste and thicken it to a paste. Take it off the heat before beating in the eggs and return it to low heat while stirring, or the eggs will scramble in visible threads.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe odd-looking "dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs" is not a misprint; the usual explanation given for it is that a first light dusting of crumbs gives the egg wash something to grip on a moist surface. Do not skip it.
- Deep fat temperaturePeriod books commonly tested fat by browning a bread cube, forty seconds being the interval usually cited for cooked mixtures like croquettes; that is somewhere in the region of 375-390F. Lower and the croquettes soak, higher and the crust colors before the center is hot.
- White SauceThe cross-reference is to the book's own White Sauce, a plain butter-flour-milk sauce; period versions run from about one to two tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American "entrée" course from the 1880s through the 1920s, and their appeal was economic as much as culinary: a small quantity of yesterday's roast, bound in a thick panada and fried, arrived at table looking like a made dish rather than a leftover. Cooking schools of the period — Boston in particular — drilled the technique heavily, and the very stiff egg-enriched binder here, cooked to a paste and chilled solid, is the classroom method. Veal is often said to have been cheaper and more plentiful in the period than it is now, and its mild flavor and pale color made it the default meat for delicate-looking dishes. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is best remembered for its confectionery, but it carried a full general household repertoire to justify a place on the kitchen shelf.