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Meat Croquettes (from Tinned Meat)
- INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-1 lb. of any kind of tinned meat, 1/24 the quantity of cold potatoes or breadcrumbs, 3 oz. of dripping or fat from the meat, 1 egg, pepper and salt, hot lard.
AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Chop the meat finely and either mash the potatoes or grate the bread, then mix with the dripping and the seasoning. Make the mixture into small rolls, dip them in beaten egg and bread-crumbs and fry in hot lard a nice bright brown. Serve with or without gravy, as liked, and garnish with fried parsley.
TIME. croquettes. 4 or 5 minutes to fry the SEASONABLE at any time.
Meat and Macaroni. (Tinned Meat.) INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-A 2-lb. tin of beef, 1/4 lb. of macaroni, a pinch of powdered cinnamon, pepper, salt, 1/2 pini of stock. AVERAGE COST, 18. 6d.
Put the macaroni into sufficient boiling If nitrogenous or flesh-forming material is required, lean meat is best, that also containing more saline and mineral matter than is found in fat meat; but where, as in cold countries, heat-givers and force-water to cover it and stew till tender, MELONS.
Mince the meat finely and season well, then put it in a stewpen with the stock and let it get hot. Serve on a large round of toast with the macaroni round.
TIME.-Altogether, 1½ hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A thrift dish built on the Edwardian storecupboard: a tin of meat, leftover potato, and a pan of hot fat. It comes together in minutes once the mixture is bound and chilled.
- The binding proportionThe quantity of potato or breadcrumb is printed as a fraction that cannot be read with confidence; something in the region of half the weight of the meat — about 8 oz mashed potato or grated crumb to 1 lb meat — is a workable reading. Judge by feel — the mixture should hold a shape without cracking.
- What "tinned meat" meantAround 1900 this commonly meant corned or boiled beef, tinned tongue or potted ham, much of it salty. Modern corned beef or a good tinned ham works; season lightly and taste before you add salt at all.
- DrippingBeef dripping is still sold, and the fat set on top of a tin of corned beef is exactly what the recipe means by "fat from the meat". Butter or a mild oil will do, but dripping is what gives the mixture its savour.
- Chill before you shapeThe mixture rolls far more cleanly, and the croquettes hold together in the fat, if it is spread on a plate and refrigerated for half an hour first. This is the single step that decides whether they survive frying.
- Egg and crumbIf you bound the mixture with breadcrumb rather than potato, the coating is a second, separate crumbing. Either way, dip in beaten egg, then in dry crumbs, and press them on firmly.
- Frying fat and temperatureThe recipe says only "hot lard"; deep fat at around 350–375F suits. Any cooler and the croquettes drink the fat; the interior is already cooked, so 4 or 5 minutes is only what is needed to brown them.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly and lower them into the fat for a few seconds only — wet parsley spits violently. They should stay green, not brown.
- Cost and yieldThe 10d. average cost is of no use now; treat it as a marker of how cheap the dish was meant to be. As written it serves four.
Croquettes were often said to be the English answer to the remains of a joint, and by some later editions of Mrs Beeton the same technique appears to have been turned on the tin. Commercially canned meat — corned beef, tinned tongue and potted ham — became cheap and widely available in British households in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and cookery writers responded with entries showing how to turn a flat, salty slab into something that looked like a made dish. Chopping, binding with potato, crumbing and deep-frying did the work: it stretched a pound of meat across four plates, disguised the uniform texture of the tin, and produced something hot at a time when hot food signalled a proper meal. The round of toast, the ring of macaroni and the fried parsley garnish in the neighbouring entries belong to the same instinct for making economy look deliberate.