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Sweet Potato Croquettes
Prepare mixture for Sweet Potato Balls. Shape in croquettes, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain.
A two-line recipe that leans entirely on the one above it, plus the standard croquette breading of the cooking-school era. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of temperature.
- You need the other recipe firstThis is only a shaping and frying method; the mixture comes from Sweet Potato Balls elsewhere in the book, a riced or mashed sweet potato mixture bound with butter, seasoning and enough hot liquid to hold together. Keep it stiff — a soft, wet mixture will burst in the fat.
- Chill before shapingNothing here says to cool the mixture, but a croquette mixture shapes far better cold; an hour in the refrigerator makes the difference between croquettes that hold their cylinders and croquettes that dissolve.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbs is deliberateCrumbs, egg, crumbs -- The recipe is explicit about the order. The usual explanation is that the first dusting of crumbs dries the damp surface so the egg has something to grip. Beating the egg with a little water or milk helps it coat thinly rather than in gluey patches.
- Fat temperatureThe book gives no temperature; the period test is a one-inch cube of bread, which should brown in about forty seconds for an already-cooked mixture. Fat much cooler than that and the crumb coat soaks; much hotter and the outside colors before the inside is hot.
- Frying timeOnly long enough to brown, a minute or two, since the filling is already cooked and needs only heating through. Fry a few at a time so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- Draining"Drain" means on unglazed paper or a rack, not stacked on a plate where the steam softens the crust. Serve promptly; croquettes do not improve on standing.
Croquettes are one of the signature forms of American cooking-school cookery, and the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is full of them — chicken, rice, hominy, lobster, sweet potato. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived with the French-influenced professional cooking that Fannie Farmer's generation systematized for home kitchens: bind a cooked, seasoned mixture, chill it, breadcrumb it, fry it, and a leftover becomes a course. Sweet potatoes gave the form an American turn, offering a way to serve sweet potato that looked more composed than a dish of mashed roots. The terse cross-reference is characteristic of the book as well — Farmer wrote in modules, expecting the reader to work backward through the section rather than repeating a mixture she had already given.