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Potato Croquettes
2 cups mashed potatoes 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 tablespoon chopped onion 1/2 tablespoon chopped parsley Salt and pepper Grated nutmeg 2 eggs Bread crumbs Mix the potatoes thoroughly with the butter, onion, parsley, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Mold them; dip in the beaten eggs; roll in bread crumbs; drop into hot fat and cook until a golden brown.
A simple deep-fried croquette that depends almost entirely on the moisture content of the potato. The original assumes a cook who already knows what a workable croquette paste feels like; a few specifics fill the gap.
- Start with dry potatoesThe hinge of the recipe. Use a floury baking potato, baked or boiled whole in its skin and riced while hot, then left to steam dry. Wet or waxy mash, or anything beaten with milk and cream, will slump in the fat and burst.
- The eggs do two jobsMrs. Fryer lists two eggs but only uses them for dipping. Many period recipes bind the potato with a yolk or two and reserve the whites, or a whole beaten egg, for the coating. Working one yolk into the warm potato gives a paste that holds its shape.
- Chill before fryingNot mentioned, but assume it. Mold the croquettes, then refrigerate them at least half an hour after breading so the surface sets. Room-temperature croquettes are the ones that split.
- Fat temperature'Hot fat' was commonly judged by the bread-cube test, a cube browning in about forty seconds for cooked mixtures of this kind, somewhere in the region of 375-390F. Below about 350F the crumb soaks; above 390F the outside colours before the centre heats through. They need only two to three minutes.
- OnionHalf a tablespoon of raw chopped onion will stay crunchy and taste sharp in the finished croquette. Soften it in the butter first, then stir butter and onion together into the potato.
- NutmegAn unmeasured 'grated nutmeg' here suggests a light grating, well under a quarter teaspoon for two cups -- enough to season without reading distinctly as nutmeg.
- CrumbsPeriod bread crumbs were dried and finely sifted stale bread, closer to modern fine dry crumbs than to panko. Either works; panko gives a coarser, crisper shell.
- YieldTwo cups of potato makes about eight cork-shaped croquettes, serving four as a side dish.
The croquette came into American home cooking from French kitchen practice, where croquette derives from croquer, to crunch, and named any bound, breaded, fried shape. By the late nineteenth century it had become a standard of the cooking-school curriculum in the United States, valued precisely because it turned leftovers into something presentable: mashed potato, cold chicken, rice, fish. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format was aimed at the household cook building a working file of dishes, and the potato croquette earned its card as the plainest possible demonstration of the mold-egg-crumb-fry sequence, a technique that once learned applied well beyond the single dish.