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Oyster and Macaroni Croquettes
1/3 cup macaroni, broken in 1½ inch pieces 1 pint oysters 1 cup Thick White Sauce Few grains cayenne Few grains mace 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice 1/4 cup grated cheese.
Cook macaroni in boiling salted water until soft, drain in a colander, and pour over macaroni two cups cold water. Clean and parboil oysters, remove tough muscles, and cut soft parts in pieces. Reserve one-half cup oyster liquor and use in making Thick White Sauce in place of all milk. Mix macaroni and oysters, add Thick White Sauce and seasonings. Spread on a plate to cool. Shape, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain.
A Fannie Farmer entrée croquette that depends on two things: a panada stiff enough to hold its shape, and oysters barely cooked. Everything else is assembly.
- Thick White SauceHere this is a stiff binding sauce, on the order of twice the flour of an ordinary white sauce — roughly a quarter cup each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid. It should be a paste that mounds on the spoon; a pourable sauce will give croquettes that collapse in the fat.
- Oyster liquorStrain the half cup of liquor through a fine sieve or cloth before using it, since shell grit settles in it. It replaces all the milk, so the sauce will be markedly saltier than a dairy one — hold off on additional salt until you taste the mixture.
- Parboiling"Parboil" here means heating the oysters in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, well under two minutes. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber inside the croquette, which then gets fried as well.
- Tough musclesThe adductor muscle is the pale firm nub on the side of each oyster. It stays chewy no matter what, so it is cut away and discarded; the rest is chopped.
- MaceGround mace is the aril of the nutmeg — warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Nutmeg can stand in, using no more than an equal amount, though "a few grains" is already the smallest measure the book uses.
- Chilling"Spread on a plate to cool" understates it. The mixture needs to go cold and firm all the way through — an hour or more chilled, longer if you can — or it cannot be shaped or breaded.
- FryingThe book judges deep fat by dropping in a cube of bread rather than by thermometer, calling for a shorter browning time for already-cooked mixtures like this one than for raw. The filling is already cooked, so the fry is only for the crust; cooler fat means grease soaks in before colour develops.
- YieldAbout eight to ten croquettes, enough for four as a first course. The pint of oysters is a volume measure — somewhere between a dozen and twenty shucked oysters depending on size.
Croquettes occupy a whole subsection of the entrée chapter in Fannie Farmer's book, and they answer a specific problem of the period: how to turn a small amount of expensive protein into a course that looked substantial at a properly served dinner. Oysters were still cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast in the book's era, and the Boston Cooking School treated them as an everyday ingredient rather than a luxury — this book contains dozens of oyster preparations. Stretching them with macaroni and binding them in a flour-thickened sauce is thrift dressed as refinement, and the crumb-egg-crumb coating with a deep-fat fry is the school's standard technique, which appears to have functioned as a repeatable formula that could be applied to chicken, veal, rice or fish.