Potato Balls
INGREDIENTS.- Mashed potatoes, egg, bread-crumbs, a little parsley, pepper and salt, dripping or lard.
Boil and mash the potatoes, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt, and a little finely-minced parsley. Form the potato POTATO CROQUETTES. into balls, dip them in egg and breadcrumbs, and fry in hot lard or dripping till a bright brown. Drain them before the fire, and dish them upon a napkin.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A frugal Victorian way of using up leftover mashed potato, given without a single measurement. A few notes on quantities, fat and handling.
- Quantities to work fromFor about 12 balls, use 1 lb (450 g) cooked potato, 1 egg for the coating and roughly 3 oz (85 g) dried breadcrumbs, plus a tablespoon of chopped parsley. Serves four as a side.
- The hinge: dry, stiff potatoWet mash falls apart in the fat. Use a floury variety, dry the drained potatoes in the pan over low heat for a minute before mashing, and mash without added milk. If the mixture still slumps, work in an egg yolk or a spoonful of flour and chill the shaped balls for 20 minutes before coating.
- Dripping and lardThe recipe treats beef dripping and lard as interchangeable, and both are still obtainable; each gives the fried flavour of the period. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works if you prefer.
- Frying temperature"Hot lard" is usually taken today to be around 180C/350F — hot enough that a crumb sizzles briskly on contact. Below that the coating soaks; much above it and the crust colours before the centre heats through.
- Ten minutes is longThe stated ten minutes may allow for a pan of fat recovering its heat between batches. Balls the size of a walnut need only 2–3 minutes to reach a bright brown, since everything inside is already cooked.
- Egg and crumb properlyBeat the egg with a pinch of salt and use fresh or dried crumbs, not panko, for a fine even surface. A first roll in flour helps the egg grip.
- Draining and dishing"Drain before the fire" means keeping them warm and dry; a rack in a 120C/250F oven does the job. The folded napkin on the serving dish absorbed grease and was standard Victorian presentation — kitchen paper under the dish cloth achieves the same end.
- The stray linePOTATO CROQUETTES appearing mid-sentence is displaced matter from the original page — a caption or heading swept into the text — not an instruction.
Potato balls and their more elongated cousin, the croquette, belong to the Victorian kitchen's steady campaign against waste: cold mashed potato from yesterday's joint, bound, crumbed and fried into something that could go up to the dining room without apology. The word croquette comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique — flour, egg, crumb, or à l'anglaise — was one of the many French methods absorbed into English middle-class cookery over the nineteenth century. This particular recipe lists its ingredients without weights, leaving the cook to judge by eye and to work with whatever quantity of potato happened to be left in the larder. "Seasonable at any time" is her usual note for a dish not tied to a market season, which by the 1860s the potato was not.