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Nut Balls with Cheese
1 cup tightly packed bread crumbs. 1 cup milk. 3/4 cup hickory nuts or pecans. 1 cup cheese. Yolks 2 eggs.
Scald milk, add other ingredients, eggs last. Cook until thick. When cool shape into balls and fry like croquettes.
A meatless croquette built on a thick bread-and-milk panada. The recipe assumes you already know croquette technique, so most of what needs saying is what Mrs. Wilson left out.
- The hinge: chill it hardCook the mixture until it is genuinely thick, then spread it on a plate and chill until firm. A barely-cooled mixture will burst apart in the fat.
- Bread crumbs"Tightly packed" suggests soft fresh crumbs from the inside of a loaf rather than the dry commercial kind. If you use dry crumbs you will need noticeably less, or the paste will be stiff and pasty.
- The cheeseA cup means grated cheese, roughly 4 oz. A firm cheddar is a reasonable reading of plain "cheese" in a Philadelphia kitchen of the period, though the recipe does not specify.
- SeasoningNone is given, and the mixture is bland without it. Salt, pepper, a little dry mustard or grated onion, and a scrape of nutmeg all belong here; season the hot mixture before you cool it, since you can't taste it once it's cold.
- Coating"Fry like croquettes" points to the usual breading of the period: flour, beaten egg thinned with water, then dry crumbs. Letting the coated balls rest before frying helps the crust set.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 365-375F, two to three minutes, until deep gold. Cooler fat soaks the crumb coating; hotter fat colors the outside before the center warms through.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory nuts were generally gathered rather than bought and are hard to find now. Pecans, her own alternative, are the direct substitute. Chop them fine; toasting is a modern addition, not something the recipe calls for.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The mixture will make somewhere between a dozen and two dozen small balls, enough for three or four as a main dish with a sauce or gravy.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for American households in the years around the First World War, when the federal food administration was urging families to save meat, wheat and fat, and cookbooks filled up with dishes that stood in for a chop. A nut croquette was understood as a meat substitute, not a side dish. Nut-based loaves and croquettes had a double lineage by then, coming partly from wartime thrift and partly from the vegetarian cookery promoted by American health reformers in the late nineteenth century, who leaned on nuts and cheese for protein. The hickory nuts are a period detail worth noticing: they came from native trees and were usually gathered and cracked at home, a free ingredient in much of the eastern United States and one of the reasons such a recipe counted as economy.