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Fish and Egg Croquettes
Make same as Fish Croquettes, using one cup fish and three "hard-boiled" eggs finely chopped.
A two-line variation that assumes you have the parent Fish Croquettes recipe open in front of you. Everything that matters is in that base formula; the change here is simply that half the fish is replaced by chopped egg.
- Read the parent recipe firstThis entry only alters the filling: one cup of flaked cooked fish plus three chopped hard-cooked eggs in place of the fish called for in Fish Croquettes. The binding sauce, seasoning, shaping, crumbing and frying are unchanged.
- The binder is the hingeCroquette mixtures are held by a very thick white sauce, far stiffer than a pouring sauce. If the paste is not stiff enough to hold a clean shape when cold, the croquettes will burst in the fat. Add more fish or egg rather than thinning.
- Chill before shapingSpread the mixture on a plate and chill until firm before rolling into cylinders or cones. Warm mixture is unworkable.
- Crumb twice if you canStandard practice is crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoon of water, then crumbs again. A second coating and a rest in the refrigerator afterwards is the best insurance against leaking.
- Frying temperatureThe bread-cube test used for already-cooked mixtures such as croquettes corresponds to fat somewhere in the region of 375-390F, though no such phrase appears in this entry. Croquettes are already cooked through, so they need only a few minutes to colour; cooler fat soaks them, hotter fat browns the crust before the centre warms.
- "Hard-boiled" in quotation marksThe quotation marks may signal reserve about the phrase; eggs were taught to be cooked in water held below the boil rather than at a rolling boil. Cooked gently and cooled at once, they give no green ring and no rubbery white.
- The fishAny firm cooked white fish or salmon, flaked and free of skin and bone; this is a leftovers recipe. Canned salmon or tuna works and needs draining well or the paste goes slack.
- YieldOne cup of fish with three eggs makes only a small dish. Serve with a thin white or tomato sauce, or a caper sauce.
Croquettes were one of the defining dishes of the American cooking-school era: cheap cooked meat or fish, a stiff flour-and-butter sauce, a neat shape, and deep fat to give it a company appearance. Fannie Farmer's 1896 book runs pages of them - chicken, lobster, rice, hominy, sweetbread - and this fish-and-egg version is a frugal cousin, stretching a single cup of leftover fish with eggs into a full dish. The terse phrasing is typical of the book's method: one master recipe followed by a string of variations, which was how the Boston Cooking School taught technique rather than a list of dishes.