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Chinese Corks
Make a thick white sauce, and when it has grown a little cold, add the yolk of one egg, and a few drops of lemon-juice. Sprinkle in a slice of stale bread, and enough grated cheese to flavor it strongly, and leave it to cool for two hours. Then shape into small pieces like corks, dip them into the beaten whites of your egg, and then into grated breadcrumbs. Have ready some hot fat, or lard, and fry the cheese-balls in it till they are golden.
This is a cheese croquette in all but name: a stiff béchamel bound with egg yolk and cheese, chilled hard, then breaded and fried. Everything depends on the sauce being thick enough to set solid.
- How thick is "thick"Aim for a panade-style béchamel — roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked out for several minutes until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. A pourable sauce will not hold a cork shape no matter how long it chills.
- The yolk goes in warm, not hot"A little cold" means the sauce should be off the heat and cooled below scalding but still warm; stir the yolk in vigorously. If the sauce is boiling the yolk will scramble in threads. The yolk is not fully cooked at this stage — it sets in the frying.
- The slice of stale breadThe original is ambiguous. "Sprinkle in" indicates the bread is grated or finely crumbled rather than added whole — a slice's worth of dry crumbs, which stiffens the mixture further. Do not soak it first.
- CheeseThe recipe names no cheese; Gruy delete re or a firm Dutch-style cheese would suit. Use about 3 to 4 ounces grated per cup of sauce; the mixture needs to taste aggressively cheesy cold, since frying mutes it.
- Two hours is a minimumChill in a shallow dish so the mixture cools through, and overnight in the refrigerator is better than two hours on a larder shelf. Warm mixture bursts in the fat.
- BreadingThe recipe uses the whites left from the yolk, which works but is thin. A pass through flour before the egg white helps the coating grip, and a second coat of crumb on any patch that looks bare will save you a blowout.
- Frying temperature350–375°F. Cooler and the croquettes absorb fat and slump; hotter and the crust colours before the centre softens. Fry a few at a time so the fat does not drop, and drain on paper.
- YieldA quantity built on 1 cup of milk gives roughly 12 to 16 cork-sized pieces — a first course for four, or a plate of something to hand round with drinks.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and its contents are domestic rather than grand, drawn from memory by people far from their own kitchens. Cheese croquettes of exactly this type, croquettes au fromage, remain a fixture of Belgian café menus, often made with Gruyère and served with fried parsley and a wedge of lemon; the lemon juice in this version is a trace of the same instinct to cut the richness. The name is the puzzle. "Corks" describes the shape plainly enough, and small cork- or cylinder-shaped fried items were common; the "Chinese" is unexplained here, and no connection to Chinese cooking is apparent.