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Almond Croquettes
Sauce made for these as follows: 2 tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons flour. 1 cup milk. Season highly. Add to this 1 cup almonds after they have been blanched, ground and browned. When cool pour on flat dish, cut in squares and fry as croquettes.
This is a terse note rather than a full recipe: Mrs. Wilson assumes you already know how a croquette is assembled, chilled, breaded and fried. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The hinge: the panade must be very stiffTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives a thin sauce by croquette standards; croquette panades are usually closer to 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked until the mass pulls away from the pan in a single lump. The cup of ground almonds will thicken the mixture a good deal, but if it is still soft when cool it will not hold a cut edge, so add flour accordingly.
- Chill, don't just cool"When cool" means thoroughly cold. Spread the mixture no more than 3/4 inch deep, cover, and refrigerate at least 2 hours or overnight. Warm croquette paste bursts its coating.
- "Fry as croquettes" means breadingThe omitted step is the standard three-stage coating: flour, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then fine dry breadcrumbs. Let the breaded squares rest 15 minutes so the crust sets.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat at 375F, enough to float the pieces, three or four at a time so the temperature holds. Two to three minutes gives a brown crust without the interior turning to liquid.
- Season highlyAn almond-and-milk filling is bland by nature. Salt generously, add white pepper, a good grating of nutmeg, and a scrape of onion or a few drops of lemon.
- Blanching and browning the almondsPour boiling water over the nuts, stand 1 minute, slip off the skins, dry them well, then toast at 350F for 8-10 minutes before grinding. Grind in short pulses -- almonds worked too long become butter, and the paste will be oily.
- Yield and servingOne cup of milk and one cup of ground almonds should make roughly 8 small croquettes, enough for about four as a course. Serve with a tomato sauce or a plain cream sauce.
Mrs. Wilson's cookbook grew out of her food-conservation columns in the Ladies' Home Journal, written in and just after the First World War, when American home cooks were urged to stretch or replace meat entirely. That is why a dish of ground almonds bound in white sauce belongs to that project at all: it is a meat substitute, offered in place of the thing it stands in for. Croquettes themselves came into American cookery from French practice in the nineteenth century -- the name is generally traced to croquer, to crunch -- and by 1900 they were a common method for turning any minced leftover, or any protein-poor filling, into something that looked like a proper course. Almonds were an obvious candidate: rich in fat and protein, and needing no refrigeration in a period when many kitchens had only an icebox.