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Nut Croquettes
1 pound sweet breads. 1/4 pound blanched almonds. 2 eggs. Cook sweetbreads, when cold grind with 1/4 pound almonds, mix with this 2 eggs, roll in bread crumbs and fry in deep fat.
A terse recipe even by Mrs. Wilson's standards: it assumes you already know how to handle sweetbreads and how to build a croquette. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Sweetbreads need prep firstSoak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they run pale, then blanch in simmering salted water for about 15 minutes. Peel away the membrane and fat, press between two plates under a weight until cold and firm, and only then grind.
- "Cook sweetbreads" means poachNot fry, not roast. A gentle simmer in water or light stock with a bay leaf and a splash of lemon juice or vinegar keeps them white and firm enough to grind cleanly.
- The mixture will be looseGround sweetbreads and almonds with two whole eggs makes a soft paste. Chill the shaped croquettes at least an hour, uncovered, before breading, or they will burst in the fat.
- Breading is a three-step jobThe recipe says only "roll in bread crumbs." In practice: flour, then beaten egg, then crumbs. Bare crumbs on a wet paste will slide off the moment the croquette hits the oil.
- Deep fat temperature375F. The interior is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust and heating through — two to three minutes, turning once. Cooler fat and they soak; hotter and the crumbs darken before the center warms.
- Blanched almondsSkinless almonds, either bought that way or covered with boiling water for a minute and slipped out of their skins. Grind them fine but stop short of almond butter; a coarse meal gives better texture against the soft sweetbread.
- Season itNo salt, pepper or nutmeg is listed. Sweetbreads are extremely mild and the mixture will taste of nothing without at least a teaspoon of salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of lemon juice.
- YieldAbout twelve croquettes of the usual cork or cone shape, serving four as a main course with a cream or mushroom sauce.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, not a bread and not sweet — appeared regularly in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, inexpensive enough for a household manual yet treated as a delicacy. Mrs. Wilson's cookery writing dates from around the end of the First World War, a period in which she was associated with wartime food-conservation cookery, and the habit of stretching meat with something else may show here: a quarter pound of almonds bulks out a pound of offal into a dish for four. The croquette was the era's workhorse for exactly this purpose — anything ground, bound with egg, crumbed and fried came to the table looking deliberate rather than thrifty.