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beaten egg; roll in bread crumbs; put in a wire frying-basket and lower into boiling hot fat. Test the fat by lowering a piece of stale bread into it; if the bread browns in thirty seconds the fat is sufficiently hot. Fry the croquettes a light brown; drain over the fat; lay on brown paper in a warm place for a few minutes and serve.
This is the tail end of a croquette recipe — the breading and frying instructions only, with the filling and shaping steps on the preceding leaf. The technique it describes is complete enough to use with any bound croquette mixture.
- The bread test in degreesStale bread browning in thirty seconds indicates very hot fat, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 375-390F, though the correspondence is only approximate and period books give a range of times. A thermometer is more reliable, but the bread test still works and is useful if your fat is deep in a heavy pot rather than a fryer.
- Chill before breadingThe step this fragment assumes is that the croquette mixture has been cooked, cooled and shaped until firm. A warm or soft mixture will burst in the fat no matter how hot it is; an hour in the refrigerator is the hinge of the whole dish.
- Flour, egg, crumbThe fragment we have begins mid-sentence at 'beaten egg,' so a flour or first crumb step may sit on the missing leaf. A light dusting of flour first gives the egg something to grip, and a second pass through egg and crumbs makes a seal that will hold under frying.
- Wire frying-basketA basket lets you lower and lift several croquettes at once without prodding them. A spider or slotted spoon does the same job; the point is that nothing should be turned with a fork, which pierces the crust.
- Fat depth and quantityDeep frying here means the croquettes float free, so allow at least three inches of fat in a pot no more than half full. Modern practice favours a neutral oil with a high smoke point; the recipe does not specify a fat, though lard and beef drippings were the usual choices of the period.
- Brown paperBrown paper meant clean grocer's or butcher's wrapping, the standard way to drain fried food before paper towels were a kitchen staple. Use paper towels or, better, a rack set over a sheet pan, which keeps the underside from steaming soft.
- Light brown means doneBecause the filling is already cooked, frying is only about the crust — two to three minutes. Pushing to a deep brown dries the interior and can split the coating.
- Batches and holdingFry four or five at a time so the fat temperature does not crash, and hold finished croquettes uncovered in a 200F oven. Covering them traps steam and ruins the crust the recipe worked to build.
Croquettes were a fixture of American cookery schools from the 1880s through the 1920s, and their logic is thrift: a thick white sauce or mashed-potato binder turns small amounts of leftover meat, fish or vegetables into something that can be served as a separate course. The bread test for fat temperature appears in cookbooks throughout the era because reliable kitchen thermometers were expensive and few home ranges had any way to hold a steady heat; cooks learned to read the fat itself.