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Lobster Croquettes
2 cups chopped lobster meat 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon mustard Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon lemon 1 cup Thick White Sauce Add seasonings to lobster, then add Thick White Sauce. Cool, shape, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain. Serve with Tomato Cream Sauce.
A standard Fannie Farmer croquette: a stiff white sauce binds the meat, then the mixture is chilled hard before shaping. Everything depends on that chilling.
- Chill it properly"Cool" means refrigerate the mixture until it is firm all the way through, at least two hours and preferably overnight. A soft mixture will burst its crust and spit in the fat.
- Thick White SauceThe book's thick version carries much more butter and flour per cup of milk than a pouring béchamel. It is meant to be stiff; a thinner sauce will not hold the shape.
- "1 teaspoon lemon"Lemon juice. Fresh, not bottled, and add it after the sauce is off the heat.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. A quarter teaspoon of English or Colman's is about right.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe order in the original is deliberate. A light first coat of dry crumbs gives the beaten egg something to grip on a moist surface; the egg is thinned with a tablespoon or two of water or milk.
- Deep fatThe recipe gives no temperature; a modern equivalent is about 375-385F. The filling is already cooked, so the aim is a fast brown crust in two to three minutes. Fry three or four at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- Lobster quantityTwo cups of chopped meat is roughly 10-12 oz picked, about two 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb lobsters. Tomalley and coral can be included if you have them; they carry a good deal of flavour.
- YieldAbout eight to ten croquettes, serving four as an entrée course. Tomato Cream Sauce appears elsewhere in the book; a plain tomato sauce loosened with a little cream stands in.
Croquettes were a staple of the late-Victorian entrée course, the small made dish served between fish and roast, bound with a flour-and-milk paste stiff enough to hold chopped meat in a shape that would survive the fat. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch. Lobster turns up constantly in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: Farmer was writing for New England households in the 1890s, when lobster was still relatively plentiful and cheap along the Massachusetts coast, and canned lobster was also widely sold. The recipe's terseness assumes the reader has already met the white sauce and the crumbing procedure taught elsewhere in the book.