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Potato Surprise
1 pt. mashed potatoes (use while hot). 1 tablespoon butter. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon celery. 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Dash cayenne. 1/2 teaspoon grated onion.
Let cool slightly. Add one yolk. Shape in balls. Fill center with peas or sweetbreads, seasoned (any cold meat will answer). Shape as croquettes or potatoes and fry in deep fat.
A stuffed potato croquette, written in Mrs. Wilson's usual shorthand. Two things are left unsaid: the potato must be dry, and the finished balls need a coating before they meet the fat.
- Dry potatoes or nothingMash a starchy potato (russet) while hot and let the steam escape before adding butter and yolk. Wet or waxy mashed potato will not hold a shell and will burst in the fryer. A pint of mashed potato is about 1 lb of potatoes before cooking, roughly 2 cups mashed.
- "1/4 teaspoon celery"The original is incomplete. Celery salt is the likeliest reading; ground celery seed would also work. If you use celery salt, cut the plain salt back to about 3/4 teaspoon.
- The coating she omitsCroquettes of this period were generally breaded before frying, commonly flour or crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with water, then fine dry breadcrumbs. Without a coating the shell is liable to split and the filling to leak into the fat.
- Fry temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Period books judged deep fat by how fast a cube of bread browned, roughly 40 to 60 seconds, which puts it somewhere around 370-385F. Cooler and the croquettes soak; hotter and the crust colours before the centre warms through.
- Fillings must be cooked firstThe croquette is in the fat two to three minutes, which only reheats. Peas should be cooked, sweetbreads poached and trimmed, and any "cold meat" already cooked and chopped fine. Nothing raw goes into the centre.
- Chill before fryingShape, coat, then refrigerate at least half an hour. Cold croquettes hold their form; warm ones slump and open at the seam.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes the size of a large egg, enough for four as a side dish or three as a supper course with a cream sauce.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and worked as a household economist in the years around the First World War, when American cookery writing was preoccupied with stretching meat and using up leftovers. That context explains this recipe exactly: the "surprise" is a spoonful of yesterday's peas, sweetbreads or scraps of cold meat hidden inside a shell of mashed potato, dressed up as a fried croquette and served as though it were a made dish. Croquettes themselves came into English and American kitchens from French practice in the nineteenth century, the name generally traced to the French croquer, to crunch. Mrs. Wilson's version is notably terse, leaving the flour-egg-crumb routine that a croquette required largely unexplained.