Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lobster Croquettes
Lobster Croquettes
Carefully pick the meat from a lobster, mince finely, and mix it with one heaped teaspoonful of finely grated breadcrumbs, two tablespoonfuls of thick cream, the strained juice of one lemon, one teaspoonful of anchovy sauce, a little grated nutmeg, pepper and salt, and stir over the fire until it is very hot. Then take it off, mix in the beaten yolk of one egg and leave until cold. Shape the lobster preparation into little balls, brush over with beaten eggs, plunge them into boiling fat and fry. When they are cooked, drain and arrange them on a hot dish, garnish with fried parsley and serve.
A short, cream-bound croquette mixture that depends almost entirely on being properly chilled before it is shaped. Everything else is straightforward.
- Chill it hardThe mixture is bound by nothing but one egg yolk, a spoonful of crumbs and the cream, so it should be chilled until genuinely firm before shaping; the original says only to leave it until cold. Warm mixture will disintegrate in the fat.
- The breadcrumbs are underspecifiedOne heaped teaspoon of crumbs to a whole lobster is very little, and the original also omits any outer crumb coat. Cooks today would egg-and-crumb the shaped balls, then chill again, which gives the crust that keeps them intact.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled anchovy essence of the period, salty and vinegared. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste plus a few drops of vinegar stands in for a teaspoon of it.
- Lemon juiceA whole lemon into one lobster's meat is assertive and also thins the mixture. Start with half and taste; the cream will take less acid than you expect.
- "Stir over the fire until very hot"Cook it over moderate heat only until it thickens into a paste that pulls from the pan — a minute or two. Lobster is already cooked and turns fibrous with further heat.
- Boiling fatDeep fat at 360–375F. Below that the croquettes soak and slump; much above it the outside colours before the centre warms. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- Fried parsleyDry, well-picked sprigs dropped into the same fat for about fifteen seconds, until they stop sputtering and turn dark green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldOne 1½ lb lobster gives roughly 1 cup of picked meat and eight to ten walnut-sized croquettes — a first course for three or four.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American hotel kitchen at the turn of the century: a way of turning small quantities of expensive protein — lobster, sweetbreads, chicken, salmon — into a hot, uniform, plated course that could be shaped in advance and fried to order. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 collection, was assembling a reference for exactly that kind of service, and the book carries dozens of croquette formulas built on the same skeleton: minced meat, a thick binder, a spell of chilling, a bath of fat. Lobster occupied a particular place in it. Once cheap enough to be considered poor man's food along the New England coast, by the 1890s it had become a hotel luxury, hauled inland by rail and iced, and appeared on menus with the kind of frequency that made economical uses for the picked meat worth writing down.