Bean Croquettes
INGREDIENTS. -Cold boiled beans, bread-crumbs, onion, egg, or flour and milk, oil or butter for frying.
Mash the beans, add flavouring of salt, pepper and chopped onion, and enough breadcrumbs to make a paste stiff enough to mould. Form the mixture into balls or cakes, egg-and bread-crumb them, or dip them in milk and then in flour, and fry a nice bright brown in oil butter. Serve very hot, with sauce or brown gravy. Peas, SCARLET RUNNER, or BEANS, BOILED FRENCH. the ordinary split ones, or German lentils, may be substituted for the beans, and parsley and herbs, with a little lemon-peel, may be used if preferred to the onion.
Beans and Tomatoes. INGREDIENTS.- Baked or boiled haricot beans about 1 lb., 1/2 pint of the liquor in which they were cooked, 1 oz. of flour, 1 oz. of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce.
Having strained the beans, thicken the liquor with the flour and butter, put in the sauce and let the mixture boil; then add the beans and serve as soon as they are hot.
Two vegetable dishes run together on one page, with a set of cross-references to other entries wedged between them. Neither gives quantities for the croquettes, so treat the first as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: a stiff pasteThe mixture must be stiff enough to hold its shape cold before it ever meets fat. Mash the beans quite dry, add breadcrumbs a spoonful at a time, and chill the moulded cakes for 20 minutes; a loose paste will burst and drink oil.
- Quantities for the croquettesThe original gives none. About 1 lb of cooked beans, 1 small onion softened in butter, 3-4 oz breadcrumbs and 1 egg makes eight croquettes, enough for four as a light main course.
- "Egg-and-bread-crumb them"Standard Victorian shorthand for a two-stage coating: beaten egg first, then dry crumbs, pressed on firmly. The milk-and-flour alternative is the cheaper, eggless version and gives a thinner, softer crust.
- FryingThe original does not say whether to shallow- or deep-fry, or how hot the fat should be. Either method works; turn the cakes once and take them only to "a nice bright brown", as the crumb coating scorches before the inside needs any more cooking.
- The stray cross-references"Peas, SCARLET RUNNER, or BEANS, BOILED FRENCH" is not an instruction but a pointer to other entries in the alphabetical book, printed in small capitals. Read the sentence as: peas, split peas or German lentils may be substituted.
- Split peas and lentilsBoth mash drier than haricots and will need less breadcrumb, sometimes none. Taste for salt separately.
- Beans and TomatoesA separate short recipe. The flour and butter are a roux: cook them together a minute, whisk in the half pint of bean liquor, boil to thicken, then stir in the tomato sauce. One ounce of each to half a pint gives a fairly thick sauce; loosen it with more liquor if you want it to pour.
- Tomato sauceHere this means a cooked, sieved tomato sauce of the sort such books gave under their own entries, rather than modern bottled ketchup. Passata with a pinch of sugar and salt is the closer substitute; ketchup will make the dish sweet.
- Bean liquorSave it when you drain the beans. Unsalted canned bean liquid works, but rinse-and-drain beans leave you with nothing to thicken, so use light stock instead of water.
Croquettes of pulses belong to the long British tradition of making meat-shaped, meat-textured food out of cheap dry goods, and Mrses Beeton's later editions carry them, expanded well beyond the 1861 original by the editors who kept the book in print under her name for decades after her death in 1865. Haricots, split peas and "German lentils" were pantry staples precisely because they kept well and cost little, and the alphabetical arrangement of All About Cookery put them in reach of a cook working without a menu plan. The egg-and-breadcrumb coating with a milk-and-flour alternative for economy is a small piece of household economics in itself: eggs were seasonal and dear, and a recipe that offered a way round them was a recipe that could be used all year.