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Egg Croquettes
1 cup cream sauce. 1 cup bread crumbs. 8 hard-boiled eggs, run through ricer. Season highly, add a dash cayenne, mix lightly. Chill, dip in crumbs and egg and fry in deep fat.
A terse recipe of the sort Mrs. Wilson wrote for readers who already knew what a croquette was. The success of the dish rests almost entirely on the thickness of the sauce and the length of the chill.
- The cream sauce must be very thickThis is the hinge. A croquette binder is a heavy white sauce made at roughly 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk or cream, cooked until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. A pouring-consistency sauce will not hold the eggs together and the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- RicerA potato ricer, which forces the hard-boiled eggs into fine shreds. The fine holes of a box grater or a few pulses in a food processor give the same texture; do not reduce the eggs to paste.
- Two lots of crumbsThe recipe uses the same word twice, but the cup in the mixture is best soft fresh breadcrumb, to absorb moisture in the body of the croquette, while the coating crumbs want to be dry and fine.
- "Season highly"Egg and cream sauce are both bland, and the seasoning is what makes the dish. Salt, white pepper, a good grating of nutmeg and the cayenne, plus chopped parsley if you like. Taste the mixture before chilling, since it cannot be corrected later.
- Chill means several hoursChill means chill properly -- Spread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate until firm right through, an hour or more; longer does no harm. Shape into cylinders or cones, and a further rest after breading helps the coating set.
- Breading orderThe line reads 'dip in crumbs and egg', but the usual working sequence is beaten egg, thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs; some cooks flour first. A second pass through egg and crumbs makes a shell less likely to split.
- Deep fat375F. Below that the croquettes soak; above it the crumb browns before the centre warms through. Two to three minutes gives a deep gold. Fry three or four at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- YieldEight eggs make about ten to twelve croquettes, enough for four to six as a light main course. Traditionally served with tomato sauce or a mushroom sauce.
Croquettes were a fixture of American middle-class cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, and nearly every general cookbook of the period carries a run of them: chicken, veal, salmon, rice, hominy, and egg. The technique is French in origin, the name from croquer, to crunch, and it arrived in English-language books largely through the cooking-school movement, which prized dishes that turned small quantities of expensive protein into a shaped, sauced, respectable-looking course. That is the logic of an all-egg croquette: it was a meat substitute and was served as one. Mrs. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger during and after the First World War, when meatless days were a matter of public exhortation, and her books are full of these quiet substitutions.