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Pepper (Tablespoons bread crumbs)
2 tablespoons bread crumbs 1 tablespoon melted butter Yolk 1 egg slightly beaten Season beef with salt, pepper, onion juice, and Worcestershire Sauce; add remaining ingredients, shape after the form of small croquettes, pointed at ends. Roll in flour, egg, and crumbs, fry in deep fat, drain, and serve with Tomato Sauce.
This is a fragment: the page picks up in the middle of an ingredient list, so the quantity and state of the beef are missing. What survives is a complete method for small fried beef croquettes, and it works if you supply the meat sensibly.
- The missing beefThe page gives no quantity or state for the meat. Croquettes of this type were normally made with cold cooked beef, and the proportions here (2 tablespoons crumbs, one yolk, a spoon of butter) suggest something in the region of a cup of finely chopped meat. Use leftover roast or braised beef, chopped fine rather than ground to a paste; a binder this light is unlikely to hold raw meat together in deep fat.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate directly and use only the liquid. A teaspoon is plenty for this quantity; the point is flavour without wet pieces that break the shape.
- Chill before shapingThe hinge of any croquette. Mix, spread on a plate, and refrigerate until firm — an hour at least. Warm, soft mixture bursts its coating the moment it hits the fat.
- Breading order"Roll in flour, egg, and crumbs" is exactly the sequence: dry flour first so the egg grips, then beaten whole egg thinned with a spoon of water, then fine dry crumbs. Let the coated croquettes rest 15 minutes so the crust sets.
- Deep fatAround 375F on a thermometer. Cookery books of this period generally judged fat by browning a cube of bread rather than by temperature. Fry in small batches for 2 to 3 minutes, only until the crust is deep gold — if the meat is already cooked it merely needs heating through.
- The pointed shapeThe recipe specifies croquettes pointed at the ends, a shape common in cookery-school work of the period. Roll each portion into a cylinder on a floured board, then pinch the ends.
- Tomato SauceThe cross-reference is to the book's own tomato sauce, of the period's usual kind: stewed tomatoes strained and bound with a butter-and-flour roux. Any thin, well-seasoned tomato sauce serves; a chunky pasta sauce does not.
- YieldIf you work from about a cup of meat, expect roughly eight small croquettes — two servings as a main course, or four as a first course or luncheon dish.
Croquettes were one of the great engines of the late-nineteenth-century American kitchen, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes pages to them: chicken, veal, sweetbread, rice, hominy, and, as here, beef. Their function was frankly economical — cold roast meat, of which a household running large joints had plenty, could be chopped, bound with a spoonful of crumbs and an egg yolk, and returned to the table looking like a deliberate dish rather than a leftover. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form reached American cookery through the professional French kitchen and the cooking-school movement that taught its methods to middle-class housekeepers. The Worcestershire sauce and onion juice are the period's standard shortcut to savour, a bottled substitute for the long-simmered glaze a restaurant cook would have had at hand.