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Maryland Croquettes
Season one cup chopped cold cooked fowl with salt, celery salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and onion juice; moisten with sauce, and cool. Parboil one pint selected oysters, drain, and cover each oyster with chicken mixture. Dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs; fry in deep fat, and drain.
Sauce. Melt one and one-half tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and gradually one-third cup oyster liquor and two tablespoons cream. Season with salt and cayenne.
A croquette built around a whole oyster rather than a shaped cylinder — the chicken mixture is the coating, not the filling. Two things decide whether it works: how briefly the oysters cook, and how stiff the sauce is.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesOysters go into their own liquor or lightly salted water only until the edges ruffle, roughly one minute. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber, and they still have a turn in the fryer ahead of them.
- The sauce is a binder, not a gravyOne and a half tablespoons butter to three tablespoons flour with barely half a cup of liquid gives a very heavy panada, and it is meant to. Cook the roux a minute before adding the oyster liquor, then beat until it pulls away from the pan.
- Chill the mixture hard"Cool" means refrigerated until firm, at least an hour. Warm chicken mixture will not stay wrapped around a slippery oyster.
- Onion juice and celery saltOnion juice is grated onion pressed through a sieve — about a teaspoon here, or use the same amount of very finely grated onion. Celery salt is still sold; count it toward the total salt.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsDry fine crumbs, not fresh, and the egg should be beaten with a tablespoon of water. Let the breaded croquettes rest 20 minutes in the refrigerator so the coating sets and does not split in the fat.
- Deep fat temperatureCroquettes made from cooked mixtures are generally fried at about 375–385°F for one to two minutes, a few at a time, to deep gold; the interior only needs heating through.
- Strain the oyster liquorPoured straight from the container it carries grit and shell fragments. Strain through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before it goes into the sauce.
- YieldA pint of shucked oysters is roughly two dozen, depending on grade and size, which serves four to six as an entree course with lemon or a tartare sauce.
The "Maryland" tag points to the Chesapeake, where oysters were cheap enough in the nineteenth century to be treated as a bulk ingredient rather than a luxury; Baltimore packing houses shipped them canned and barrelled across the country, so oyster recipes were common well beyond the Chesapeake. Croquettes are French in origin and were a fixture of American cooking-school teaching, drilling two techniques the schools valued: a thick binding sauce and correctly managed deep fat. The specific attribution to Maryland is conventional rather than documented.