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Fish Croquettes (To one and one-half cups cold)
To one and one-half cups cold flaked halibut or salmon add one cup thick White Sance. Season with salt and pepper, and spread on a plate to cool. Shape, roll in crumbs, egg, and crumbs, and fry in deep fat; drain, arrange on hot dish for serving, and garnish with parsley. If salmon is used, add lemon juice and finely chopped parsley.
A classic panada croquette: cooked fish bound with a very stiff white sauce, chilled hard, then breaded and deep-fried. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens before the croquettes reach the fat.
- Chill, don't just coolSpread the mixture in a thin layer and chill it until firm and sliceable before shaping; an hour or so, longer is better. A warm or soft mixture will burst in the fat and empty itself into the pan.
- How thick is "thick White Sauce"A thick white sauce of this period runs to something like 3 or 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 cup of milk, several times the flour of a pouring sauce. A thin bechamel will not bind the fish and the croquettes will collapse.
- "White Sance" is a typesetting slipThe original page reads Sance; it means White Sauce.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe order as written is correct and deliberate: a first light coat of dry crumbs gives the beaten egg something to grip, so the shell seals. Use fine dry crumbs, not fresh, and let the breaded croquettes rest in the refrigerator 20–30 minutes before frying.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat for croquettes wants to be hot enough to set the crust in about a minute, roughly 375F, since the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through. The period test for a cooked mixture like this is a one-inch cube of bread browning in about 40 seconds. Fry a few at a time so the temperature doesn't crash.
- FishAny firm cooked white fish or salmon works; leftover poached or baked fish is what the recipe assumes. Flake it and pick out bones and skin, and squeeze out excess moisture, which loosens the binding.
- Yield and servingOne and a half cups of fish with a cup of sauce makes about 8 small croquettes, enough for three or four as a main course. A thinned white sauce, egg sauce or tartar sauce served alongside is period-appropriate and welcome.
- DrainingDrain on a rack rather than piling on paper, or the underside steams and softens. Hold finished croquettes in a 250°F oven while you fry the rest.
Croquettes were one of the great economies of the late-nineteenth-century kitchen: a way of turning a plate of cold cooked fish, poultry or meat into something that could be sent to table looking deliberate. The technique is French â the binding paste of butter, flour and milk is a panade, and the word croquette comes from croquer, to crunch â and it was among the dishes taught in the professional and cooking-school tradition, including the Boston Cooking School, where Fannie Farmer became principal in 1891. That the recipe is stated as a ratio ("to one and one-half cups cold...") rather than a dish in its own right suggests an interest in teaching proportions so a cook could apply them to whatever the larder held. The instruction to add lemon juice and parsley to salmon reflects a period preference for cutting the oilier fish, salmon being commonly available in cans by the 1890s and often the fish actually in the house.