Home › Entrees and Made-Over Dishes › Surprise Croquettes
Surprise Croquettes
2 cups mashed potatoes 4 tablespoons cream 1 teaspoon onion-juice 2 egg-yolks 1 egg-white Salt and pepper Cooked meat, cheese or vegetable Crums and flour To the mashed potato add cream or rich milk, onion-juice and salt and pepper to taste. Beat over the fire until smooth and hot. Remove, slightly cool, and add the beaten egg-yolks. Form into cylinders, or cone shapes; make a depression in each, and into this put a teaspoon of creamed chicken, minced highly seasoned meat, grated cheese, or a vegetable in cream sauce. Press the potato around the filling. Beat the egg-white slightly, dilute with a tablespoon of water, roll the croquettes in flour, egg and then in seasoned bread-crums, and fry in deep fat.
A thrifty way to use up small amounts of leftover meat, cheese or creamed vegetables, hidden inside a potato shell. The recipe assumes you already know how deep-fat frying works, so a few specifics are worth filling in.
- The hinge: dry the potatoThe mixture must be stiff and dry or the croquettes will burst in the fat. Beating over the heat is not just for warmth; it drives off moisture. Use a floury baking potato, not waxy, and chill the shaped croquettes at least 30 minutes before coating.
- Onion-juiceAn old kitchen staple: grate an onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. Half a small onion yields about a teaspoon. Grated raw onion left whole adds water and lumps.
- CreamFour tablespoons of what the period called cream is roughly today's heavy or light cream; the recipe's own "rich milk" is an acceptable substitute. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop if the potato slackens.
- Crums and flour"Crums" is bread-crumbs, and the period meant dry fine crumbs from stale bread, not coarse panko. The three-stage coating is flour, then diluted egg-white, then crumbs; let the coated croquettes rest 15 minutes so the crust sets.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Modern practice for croquettes is around 375F: cooler and the potato drinks oil and slumps; hotter and the crumbs brown before the filling warms through. Two to three minutes, turning once, should be enough since everything inside is already cooked.
- FillingKeep it to a scant teaspoon and make sure it is cold and thick. A loose cream sauce will steam and split the shell. Cheese is the most likely to leak, so seal the potato carefully over it.
- YieldTwo cups of mashed potato should make roughly eight croquettes; the recipe gives no yield or number of servings.
Croquettes were a mainstay of the "made-over dishes" chapters in American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1930s, the era when a household was expected to account for every scrap of Sunday's roast. The word is French, from croquer, to crunch, and the dish reached English-language cooking largely through French professional influence, though croquettes appear in English cookery books well before the later nineteenth century; by the period of this recipe it had become thoroughly domestic, a way of turning a spoonful of chicken into a plated dish. The "surprise" is the hidden filling, a device that appears elsewhere in period cookery under that name, in croquettes, in muffins and in puddings. Onion-juice, called for here rather than chopped onion, may reflect a preference of the period for onion flavor without visible onion.