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Beef Kromeskies
1½ tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1 cup milk 1 pint cold beef 1 teaspoon salt Dash of pepper 1 tablespoon parsley 1 teaspoon onion juice Melt the butter; add the flour; then the milk gradually, stirring to prevent lumps. Cook until it thickens; mix in the chopped beef and seasonings and set aside to cool. When cool form into small cylinders. dip each in fritter batter and fry in smoking hot fat.
A leftover-beef croquette bound in a very stiff white sauce. The recipe is a page from a loose-leaf book, and it shows: the batter it calls for is not given here, and three ingredients from the next recipe have run onto the end.
- The stray last lineThe 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup flour, 1/4 cup cornstarch at the foot belongs to another leaf, not to the kromeskies. Ignore it; the beef mixture uses only the butter, flour and milk listed at the top.
- A pint of cold beefMeasured by volume, not weight: 2 cups of finely chopped cooked beef, roughly 10 to 12 oz of leftover roast or boiled beef. Chop it fine by hand rather than grinding to paste, or the cylinders turn pasty.
- The hinge is the chillThe panada must be genuinely cold and firm before shaping. Spread it in a shallow dish, cover the surface, and refrigerate at least two hours; warm or soft mixture will burst the batter in the fat. Shaped cylinders benefit from another half hour in the cold.
- The sauce is meant to be stiffThe sauce and the beef - A tablespoon and a half each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is a lighter ratio than the usual croquette panada, so the mixture is held together as much by the quantity of beef as by the sauce; chill it well. Cook the sauce a good two or three minutes past the point where it thickens so the flour loses its raw taste, then beat in the beef off the heat.
- Fritter batterNot supplied on this leaf. Any plain coating batter works: about 1 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg and roughly 2/3 cup milk or water, beaten smooth to the thickness of heavy cream. It should coat the cylinder without running off.
- Smoking hot fatIn practice 375F. Fat actually smoking is past its useful point and will taste scorched; test with a cube of bread, which should brown in about 40 seconds. Fry a few at a time so the temperature holds, and drain on paper.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon takes about a quarter of a medium onion. It gives the flavour without wet pieces that would loosen the mixture.
- YieldAbout a dozen cylinders, enough for four as a light main course with a salad, or eight as a savoury. Best eaten within minutes of frying.
- Filed oddlyThis is filed under Vegetables, which looks like a slip in a loose-leaf system. Nothing about it is meatless.
Kromeskies are the English spelling of the Polish kromeski, taken into French professional cookery as cromesquis and from there into Anglo-American household books through the late nineteenth century. The name is generally traced to Polish kromka, a slice or small piece. In the grander French versions the filling was wrapped in a thin sheet of bacon or in pig's caul before being battered and fried, which is what nominally distinguished a kromesky from a plain croquette; American cookbooks quietly dropped the wrapping and kept the shape. What survives here is the domestic economy end of the tradition: a thick panada of butter, flour and milk used to stretch a pint of Sunday's cold roast into a Tuesday dish, a technique that ran through household cookery for as long as families roasted large joints and expected to eat them for days.</p>