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Veal Croquettes
Put the veal in the kettle with enough boiling water to cover, Remove to the cooker for three hours. Use one hot radiator. Chop fine and season highly with salt, pepper, celery salt, paprika and lemon juice. Use one and a half cups of veal with one cup of thick cream dressing. Shape in cylinders. When cool roll in egg and bread crumbs and fry in hot fat.
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A fireless-cooker recipe: the veal is brought to a boil on the range, then transferred to an insulated box to finish on stored heat. The method translates directly to a slow cooker or a covered pot held at a bare simmer.
- The fireless cooker and the "radiator"A fireless cooker was an insulated chest; the "radiator" was a soapstone or metal disc heated on the range and set in with the kettle to add stored heat. One radiator gave a gentle, declining heat, and the contents would have dropped below boiling over the three hours. A slow cooker on low for 3 hours, or a covered pot at 185-200F, gives a comparable result with a temperature you can verify.
- Do not let it coast coldThe one thing to watch with any fireless-cooker conversion is that the meat stays hot the whole time. Bring the veal to a full boil before it goes into the insulated box, and if the water is merely warm at the end of three hours, cook it through on the stove rather than trusting it.
- Quantity of vealThe recipe never says how much to start with. Shoulder or breast, about 1 lb boneless, cooks down and chops to roughly the 1 1/2 cups called for. Save the cooking liquid; it makes a better sauce than milk alone.
- "Thick cream dressing"This is a very stiff white sauce, not cream: about 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup of milk or veal broth, cooked until it pulls away from the pan. Ordinary béchamel proportions will give a croquette that collapses in the fat.
- Chill, do not merely cool"When cool" understates it. Spread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least 2 hours, preferably overnight, before shaping. Cold, firm paste is the difference between a croquette and a grease slick.
- BreadingCrumb, then egg, then crumb again for a seal that holds. Let the coated cylinders rest 20 minutes in the refrigerator before frying.
- Frying"Hot fat" here means deep fat at roughly 375-390F. Fry 2-3 minutes, until deep gold; the filling is already cooked, so the object is only to set the crust before the interior softens.
- YieldAbout 8 croquettes, serving four as a light main course with a mushroom or tomato sauce.
Croquettes were the standard American answer to cooked meat left over from a roast or a boiling piece, and veal — mild, gelatinous — was the classic filling. Placing them in a fireless-cookery chapter reflects a brief but serious enthusiasm: from roughly the 1900s through the 1920s, insulated cookers were promoted as fuel-saving, unattended labor savers for the woman without a servant, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried a section adapting familiar dishes to them. The instruction to "use one hot radiator" is the tell — heat was measured in stones, not degrees, and the cook was expected to know how long her own box held them. The high seasoning, celery salt, paprika and lemon juice, is equally of its moment: long-simmered veal is bland, and the period answer was to season the chopped meat aggressively rather than the broth.