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Beef and Rice Croquettes
Sauce Tartare. 1 cup chopped beef (cut from top of round) 1/3 cup rice ¼ teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne
What survives here is a fragment: a dish name, a sauce cross-reference, and part of an ingredient list. The method is missing, so treat the following as notes on reading and reconstructing it rather than as a set of instructions.
- The text is incompleteNo binding sauce, egg, crumbs, salt or frying instruction appears, though a croquette normally needs them. Croquettes in cooking-school books of this type are generally bound with a thick white sauce or with egg, chilled firm, shaped, then egged, crumbed and fried; take that as the general pattern rather than as this recipe's own missing method.
- "14 teaspoon"This is an artifact of the original fractions setting: read it as 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Nothing in the period called for fourteen teaspoons of pepper in a cup of beef.
- Sauce TartareThe line at the top is not one of the ingredients. It is most likely a serving direction pointing to the book's tartare sauce, a mayonnaise base with capers, olives, pickle and onion, though in a fragment of this kind it may equally be a stray line from an adjoining entry.
- Top of the roundA lean cut. Croquettes of this era were commonly made with cold cooked beef, chopped fine by hand or put through a grinder, as a way of using yesterday's roast or boiled beef; the fragment itself does not say whether the meat here is cooked or raw.
- The riceA third of a cup is dry measure, yielding roughly a cup cooked. It should be cooked soft and slightly sticky so it works as part of the binder rather than as loose grains.
- YieldA cup of meat with a third of a cup of rice makes only a small batch, enough for a few people as a light entree in the period sense of a course between the fish and the roast. The recipe as it survives gives no yield.
- FryingCroquettes of this period were deep fried in fat hot enough to brown a cube of bread in forty seconds, the usual test for cooked mixtures; no temperature is given in the text, and modern equivalents put that somewhere around 375-390F. Cooler fat lets them soak and burst, and where a chilling step is called for it is what keeps them intact.
Croquettes were the backbone of the American cooking-school entrée: a fixed technique — chop, bind, chill, shape, crumb, fry — applied to whatever protein the household had left over, and taught as a set of proportions rather than as individual dishes. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form reached American tables through the French-influenced service that cooking schools like Boston's were built to teach middle-class housekeepers without French staff. Rice appears here as an extender, standard practice when meat was the expensive item on the plate. That the recipe survives only as a fragment is itself typical of these books, where short entries ran together with cross-references like the Sauce Tartare line running into the ingredient list.