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Ham Croquettes
2 cups mashed potatoes
Cayenne
1 tablespoon butter or other
1 cup cooked ham fat
Egg and crums
3 egg-yolks
Mix potato, butter or other fat, yolks of two eggs and cayenne, beat until smooth, then set to cool. Chop the ham, mix with the other yolk, set on the stove for a moment, then turn out to cool. When thoroughly cool, take a tablespoon of the potato mixture, make a hole in it, put a large teaspoon of the chopped ham inside, close the hole and shape in a ball. Dip in flour, then in egg, roll in crums, and fry in deep fat.
The ingredient list has been mangled by the book's two-column layout: read it as 2 cups mashed potatoes, 1 tablespoon butter or other fat, 1 cup cooked ham, 3 egg yolks, cayenne, and egg and crumbs for coating.
- The hinge: cold, stiff potatoThe potato mixture must be thoroughly chilled and dry enough to hold a hollow without slumping. Use baking potatoes mashed with no milk or cream; wet mash will burst its coating in the fat and fill the pan with grease-logged debris.
- Where the three yolks goTwo yolks are beaten into the potato, the third into the chopped ham. The whites are left over; the recipe does not say what becomes of them, and the coating simply calls for egg.
- "Egg and crums"Period shorthand for the standard breading: beaten egg and fine dry breadcrumbs. Panko works but gives a coarser shell than the book intends.
- Setting the ham on the stoveThe brief moment on the stove is only to set the yolk so the filling binds into a mass. Keep it in motion over low heat and pull it off before it scrambles.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives no fat temperature or test. Use 375F; below that the croquettes soak, above it the crumbs colour before the centre warms through. They need only two to three minutes, since every component is already cooked.
- HamModern supermarket ham is wetter and milder than the dry-cured leftovers this recipe was built to use up. Pat it dry after chopping, and taste before adding salt — the cayenne is the only seasoning specified because the ham was expected to supply the rest.
Croquettes belong to the tradition of "made-over dishes," the sort of section common in American household manuals of the early twentieth century, which existed for one reason: a family that ate a joint of ham on Sunday still had ham on Wednesday, and refrigeration was uncertain. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the form reached American kitchens through the professional French cooking that domestic-science writers were busy translating into terms a household cook with one range could manage. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its recipe collections for exactly that reader, for whom encasing yesterday's meat in potato and frying it was less a French flourish than a way of making a second dinner look like a first.