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Cheese Croquettes
1 cup white sauce. 1 cup cheese. 1/2 teaspoon grated onion. Mix all together and when cool add whites of 2 eggs beaten stiff. When chilled cut in oblong pieces, dip in crumbs and fry.
A very terse formula, even by Mrs. Wilson's standards. Two things are unstated and both decide whether it works: the white sauce must be thick enough to set solid, and the mixture must be genuinely cold before it is shaped.
- The white sauceThis wants a croquette-thick béchamel, not a pouring sauce — roughly 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. A thin sauce will not hold its shape no matter how long it chills.
- "1 cup cheese"Grated firm cheese, packed loosely — about 3 to 4 oz. A sharp cheddar or a dry aged cheese gives the flavour; anything very soft or high-moisture will loosen the paste.
- Grated onionGrate it on a fine rasp and use the juice as well as the pulp. Half a teaspoon is a background note; raw chopped onion in its place will stay crunchy and weep liquid.
- The egg whitesFold them in only after the sauce has cooled, as the recipe directs, or they will cook into threads. Their main job is to lighten the interior rather than to bind it, so do not count on them to compensate for a slack sauce.
- ChillingSpread the mixture about 3/4 inch deep in a buttered pan and refrigerate at least 3 hours, or overnight. Cutting into oblongs from a cold slab is much easier than rolling a soft paste by hand.
- BreadingCrumbs alone may not adhere well to a chilled cheese paste. The standard sequence - flour, beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs - is more reliable, and chilling the coated pieces another 20 minutes helps the crust set before it meets the fat.
- FryingDeep-fry at 375F, in enough oil to float them, two or three at a time. They need only 1 to 2 minutes to colour; longer and the cheese inside breaks and leaks through the crust. Drain on a rack, not paper, to keep the underside crisp.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 croquettes — a light supper dish for three or four with a salad, or a first course for six.
Croquettes were one of the great workhorses of American cookery between about 1880 and 1930: a thick white sauce, something savoury folded in, chilled, crumbed and fried. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived with the French-influenced restaurant and cooking-school cuisine that shaped so many household manuals of the period. Mrs. Wilson, who wrote food columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and worked on domestic food conservation during the First World War, was steadily promoting cheese, beans and eggs as the dish that stands where the meat would otherwise stand. Recipes this compressed were typical of her newspaper work, where space was short and readers were assumed to know what a white sauce was.