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Croquettes, Sauces, Etc. Sauce
1 tablespoon butter. 2 tablespoons flour. 1 pint milk. Yolks of 2 eggs or whole egg.
A little grated onion adds to this mixture. 2 cups of meat to this proportion.
This is a proportion, not a procedure: a thick egg-enriched white sauce used to bind chopped cooked meat into croquettes. Everything depends on getting it stiff enough to hold a shape when cold.
- The hinge: this binder is loose as writtenTwo tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk works out to about a tablespoon per cup, which gives a pouring sauce rather than a croquette paste. Other croquette recipes of the period generally call for considerably more butter and flour to the same quantity of milk; the two egg yolks help, but expect a mixture that must be reduced hard and chilled solid before it will shape.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups (about 475 ml).
- Cooking the sauceMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the raw taste out for a minute or two before adding the milk. Cook the sauce until it is genuinely thick and pulls from the pan, then temper the yolks with a little hot sauce before stirring them in off the heat so they do not scramble.
- "A little grated onion"Roughly a teaspoon of onion grated on the fine side of a box grater, juice and all. Add it to the butter at the start rather than at the end; raw onion juice stirred in late reads sharp against the milk.
- The meatTwo cups of cooked meat means finely chopped or ground cooked chicken, veal, ham or leftover roast — never raw. Season the mixture assertively with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg or lemon; cold binder mutes seasoning.
- Chilling is not optionalSpread the mixture in a shallow pan, cover the surface, and refrigerate at least four hours or overnight. Warm croquette paste will not roll, and it bursts in the fat.
- FinishingShape into cylinders or cones, roll in flour, then beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs, and rest the coated croquettes in the refrigerator 30 minutes. Fry at 375°F for two to three minutes — everything inside is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly 10 to 12 croquettes, enough for four to six as a main course with a sauce alongside.
Croquettes were the standard American answer to the problem of yesterday's roast: a thick white sauce, called a panada in professional kitchens, cements minced cooked meat into a paste that can be shaped, crumbed and fried. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the dish entered English-language cookbooks through the French-influenced cooking schools of the later nineteenth century, where Fannie Farmer, Sarah Tyson Rorer and others all published proportion tables of their own. Mary A. Wilson wrote in and just after the First World War, when federal food-conservation campaigns pressed home the duty of using every scrap of meat, and her habit of giving a bare ratio rather than a narrative recipe may well reflect that teaching style: learn the proportion, then apply it to whatever the icebox holds.