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Potatoes en Surprise
Make Potato Croquette mixture, omitting parsley. Shape in small nests and fill with Creamed Chicken, shrimp, or peas. Cover nests with Croquette mixture, then roll in form of croquettes. Dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again; try in deep fat, and drain on brown paper.
A composed recipe that assumes you already have two others open on the counter: the potato croquette mixture and a creamed filling. It works, but only if both are cold and stiff before you begin.
- The base mixtureFannie Farmer's potato croquette mixture is about 2 cups hot riced potato beaten with 2 tablespoons butter, 1/2 teaspoon salt, a little pepper, a few grains cayenne, 1 egg yolk and 1 tablespoon hot milk or cream. Here the parsley is left out so the green flecks do not muddy the surprise inside.
- Dry the potatoUse a starchy baking potato, boil or bake it, and rice it while hot so the steam escapes. A wet mash will not hold a nest shape and will burst in the fat.
- Chill everythingThis is the hinge. Both the potato mixture and the filling must be refrigerated until firm — an hour at least. A warm creamed filling turns to liquid inside the shell and blows it open in the fryer.
- Filling consistencyWhatever you use, the creamed chicken, shrimp or peas should be bound in a thick white sauce, closer to paste than to gravy, and cut small. About a teaspoon per croquette is enough.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe order given is deliberate: the first light coating of crumbs gives the egg something to grip on a damp surface, and the second seals it. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh, and let the breaded croquettes rest 15–20 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Deep fat temperature"Try in deep fat" means fry, and croquettes of cooked food want hot fat. The period books gauge this by how quickly a cube of bread browns rather than by a thermometer; on a modern gauge that is somewhere around 385–390°F. A minute or so is enough to brown the crust and warm the centre. Cooler fat soaks in and the shell splits.
- DrainingBrown paper was the period's paper towel. Any absorbent paper or a wire rack works; a rack keeps the underside crisper.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; two cups of potato mixture will make roughly eight to twelve croquettes, depending on size, enough for three or four as a side dish.
"En surprise" was a stock phrase on late nineteenth-century menus for anything that concealed one food inside another: omelettes with ice cream inside, potatoes hiding creamed chicken. It belongs to the same impulse that produced baked Alaska: the pleasure was in the cut, when the guest discovered what the shell had been hiding. The croquette itself is French in origin, and it turns yesterday's chicken and this morning's potatoes into a course that looks composed. Farmer's book is full of such cross-referenced recipes: the student who had already mastered croquette mixture and white sauce could be handed a new dish in four sentences.