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Croquettes of Veal
Make first of all a very thick white sauce of flour, milk, and butter, not forgetting also salt and pepper; when it is very thick add grated Gruyere cheese, in the proportion of a heaped teaspoonful of this to a breakfast-cupful of sauce. Take it off the fire, and stir in first of all the juice of a lemon, and then the yolk of an egg. Let it get cold. Then mince up finely your veal, or, indeed, any lean meat. Mix it well with the sauce, and make croquettes of it. Then roll each in the white of egg that you have left, and then in grated breadcrumbs, and fry in deep fat. Entree (Croque-Monsieur) Cut out some rounds of crumb of bread of equal size, with a tin cutter; or, failing that, with a wineglass. Butter all the rounds and sprinkle them with grated cheese--for preference with Gruyere. On half the number of rounds place a bit of ham cut to the same size. Put a lump of butter the weight of egg into a pan, and fry with the rounds in it, till they become golden. When they are a nice color, place one round dressed with cheese on a round dressed with ham, so as to have the golden bread both above and below. Serve them very hot, and garnished with fried parsley.
Two related dishes share the page: a bound veal croquette and a fried cheese-and-ham round. Both depend on getting one thing right — in the croquettes, the sauce must be stiff enough to slice cold.
- The hinge: a panade, not a pouring sauce"Very thick" means a paste that holds a spoon upright — roughly 3 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk, cooked until it pulls away from the pan. Chilled at least 3 hours (overnight is better) it should cut like firm cheese; anything softer bursts in the fryer.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is the large cup of a breakfast service, around 8 to 10 fl oz. Treat it as a generous cup.
- Cheese proportionA heaped teaspoon of Gruyere per cup of sauce is a background note rather than a cheese sauce. Two tablespoons per cup is closer to modern taste and will not slacken the mixture.
- Lemon and yolk, off the heatBoth go in after the pan leaves the burner, as written. Add the yolk while the sauce is hot but not boiling so it thickens rather than scrambles, and add the lemon gradually — a whole lemon into a small batch is sharp, so taste as you go.
- Meat to sauceThe book gives no ratio. Roughly equal volumes of finely minced cooked veal and cold sauce gives a croquette that still holds; more meat than that and it crumbles when shaped.
- The egg-white coatingWhite alone, as directed, gives a thinner crust than whole beaten egg. Loosen it with a fork and a teaspoon of water so it coats evenly, and refrigerate the breaded croquettes 30 minutes before frying to set the shell.
- Deep fat350–375F, in batches, 2 to 3 minutes until deep gold. The filling is already cooked; the frying is only for crust and heat, and a cooler pan lets fat soak in and the shells split.
- "Crumb of bread" for the croque-monsieurThis is the soft interior of a loaf with the crust cut away, not breadcrumbs. Cut rounds from close-textured white bread about 1/2 inch thick; a 2 1/2-inch cutter is about right.
- Butter "the weight of egg"About 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Fry over moderate heat so the bread colors before the butter browns, and turn once.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds, then drained — they spit if wet. Yield: the croquette mixture from one cup of sauce makes about 8 small croquettes, enough for two as an entrée.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it was produced in aid of refugee relief; that accounts for its plain, thrifty register and its reliance on the cook's memory rather than exact weights. Croquettes belong squarely to that tradition -- a way of turning a little leftover roast into a course, bound with a stiff bechamel that goes back to the French sauce repertoire and is still the basis of the Belgian croquettes de crevettes found in brasseries. The croque-monsieur at the end is a newer arrival: it is generally traced to Parisian cafes in the years just before the First World War, and its appearance here, explained from first principles down to the improvised wineglass cutter, suggests an English readership meeting it for the first time.