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Cheese Dishes Served with Salads (Method Make a sauce)
Method. Make a sauce of the butter, flour and milk; add the yolks, slightly beaten, and beat thoroughly; add the grated cheese, and, when melted, remove from the fire; add the seasonings and cubes of cheese. Spread in a shallow pan to cool. Cut in any shape desired, dip in crumbs, then in egg, and again in crumbs; fry in deep fat and drain on brown paper. 1/2 a cup of water. ¼ a cup of butter. ½ a cup of flour.
This is a cheese croquette: a very thick white sauce, enriched with egg yolk and loaded with cheese, chilled solid, cut, breaded and deep-fried to serve alongside a salad. The quantities as printed do not match the method, so treat it as a technique to follow rather than a formula to measure.
- The quantities are unusableThe method calls for butter, flour, milk, yolks, grated cheese and cubed cheese, but the figures given list only water, butter and flour, and one of them has lost its fraction. Work from a panada of your own proportions: equal weights of butter and flour cooked together, then enough milk to make a paste stiff enough to hold a spoon upright.
- The hinge is the chillingThe mixture must be spread thin, no more than about three-quarters of an inch, and refrigerated until it is genuinely firm to the fingertip. Croquettes that are cut while still soft burst in the fat and empty themselves into it.
- Cubes of cheese, not more gratedThe cubes go in after the pan leaves the heat so they stay whole and melt only in the fryer, giving pockets of molten cheese inside a set body. Cut them small, about a quarter inch, and use a firm cheese; a young mozzarella will weep.
- Deep fat means 375FDeep fat -- The book gives no temperature. Period books judged the fat by a cube of bread browning in about forty seconds for a cooked mixture such as this, which corresponds roughly to the high 300sF. Fat too cool and the crumb coating drinks it; too hot and the crust colours before the centre softens.
- Double breading, and let it restCrumb, egg, crumb is deliberate and worth following exactly. Chill the breaded pieces another twenty minutes before frying so the coating sets into a continuous shell.
- Brown paperKitchen brown paper was the standard drain of the period. Paper towel on a rack does the same job; the rack matters more than the paper, since croquettes sitting flat go soggy on the underside.
- ServingThe title places these with salads. They do not hold: fry them at the last moment, as the interior stiffens as it cools.
Cheese croquettes of this kind are generally traced to the American chafing-dish and ladies'-luncheon vogue of the turn of the century, when a hot savoury of cheese was the accepted way to give a cold salad course some substance. The construction is straight French cookery: a panade, or very stiff paste, used as a binder for a flavouring, chilled until it can be cut, then crumbed and fried. Croquettes of lobster, chicken, sweetbreads and rice are well attested in the cookery books of the period alongside those of cheese. The pairing with salad reflects the era's growing enthusiasm for lettuce and mayonnaise as a course in their own right, which still felt too slight to end a meal on without something hot beside it.