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Lobster Croquettes
To one cup of the cream foundation used in preceding recipe add two cups of chopped lobster meat which has been seasoned with one teaspoon lemon juice and onefourth teaspoon of mustard. Cool, mold and cook as before. Serve with a Tomato Cream Sauce. See chapter on Sauces for Fish, Meat, Poultry and Game.
This is a shorthand recipe that assumes you have just read the two before it: a thick cream "foundation" (a very stiff bechamel used as a binder) and a set of instructions for molding, breading and frying. The notes below fill in what the page leaves out.
- The hinge: chill it hardA croquette holds its shape only because the panada binder is cold and firm. Spread the lobster mixture in a shallow pan, cover, and refrigerate at least three or four hours, or overnight. Shaping a barely cooled mixture is the single most common reason croquettes burst in the fat.
- What "cream foundation" meansNot pouring cream and not a modern sauce consistency. Croquette foundations of this period were far stiffer than a pouring sauce: on the order of a quarter-cup of butter and a half-cup of flour to a cup of milk or cream, thick enough to stand up in a spoon. The exact proportions are in the preceding recipe, which is not reproduced here. If your binder pours, it is too thin for this use.
- Mustard"Mustard" in a household cookbook of this period almost certainly means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would also bring vinegar and water, which loosens the mixture.
- Two cups of lobster meatAbout 10 ounces picked meat, which is two to three 1 1/4-lb hardshell lobsters. Chop it fairly fine but not to paste; visible pieces are the point. Tail, claw and knuckle all work, and the tomalley can go in with the binder if you like it.
- FryingThe breading and frying directions are in the preceding recipe, not here. In modern terms: egg-and-crumb coating, deep fat at about 375F, three to four minutes until the crust is deep gold. The interior is already cooked, so you are only heating through and setting the shell. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop much below 350F.
- Season the binder tooThe lemon and mustard go into the lobster, but the foundation itself needs salt, white pepper and a little cayenne or nutmeg. An underseasoned panada is what makes croquettes taste pasty.
- The sauce cross-referenceThe tomato cream sauce sits in the sauce chapter and is not reproduced here. In books of this kind such a sauce is usually a white sauce or velouté rather than a tomato sauce with cream stirred in. Add the tomato off the boil to keep it from separating.
- YieldAbout eight to ten croquettes, serving four as a main course with the sauce, or six as a first course.
Croquettes were one of the defining dishes of the American cooking-school era, and this entry shows why: a single stiff white-sauce "foundation" was taught once, then varied endlessly with chicken, sweetbreads, rice, salmon or lobster, so a whole chapter could be written in three lines apiece. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique reached American kitchens through the professional French repertoire before Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries drilled it into home cooks as an exercise in proportion and economy. Lobster here was probably less of a luxury than it later became, though how far that held at any given moment is hard to say; New England and Maritime canneries had been shipping lobster meat in tins since the mid-nineteenth century, and canned lobster was a pantry staple that made a dish like this plausible far inland. The recipe leans on a separate sauce chapter for its foundation, a reminder of how much these books asked the cook to learn once and apply everywhere.