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Potato Croquettes
Take four mealy boiled potatoes of good size and add to them half their weight of butter, the same quantity of powdered white sugar, and place them in a mortar, pounding them well together with a little salt, the grated peel of half a lemon and two beaten eggs. Then beat up the yolks of four eggs, roll up the paste in the mortar into cork-shaped pieces, and dip them into the beaten yolk, rolling them in sifted breadcrumbs, and let them stand for an hour, then dip them in beaten egg or brush it over them, and roll once again in the breadcrumbs. Fry in boiling lard or butter, after which lay them on paper to drain, and arrange them on ornamental paper, spread over a dish, garnish with parsley, and serve.
Despite the name, this is closer to a sweet fritter than a savoury side: butter and sugar each at half the weight of the potato put it in dessert territory. Read the proportions carefully before you scale it.
- The proportions are the whole dishFour good-sized mealy potatoes come to roughly 1 lb 8 oz peeled and cooked, which means about 12 oz butter and 12 oz sugar. That is an enormously rich paste; if you want a savoury croquette to go beside meat, this is not the recipe.
- Mealy potatoesRussets or another high-starch baking potato. Boil them whole in their skins so they do not waterlog, then peel while hot. A waxy potato will give a gluey paste no matter how well you pound it.
- Mortar or ricerThe mortar is doing what a ricer does now. Press the hot potato through a ricer or fine sieve, then beat the butter, sugar, salt, lemon zest and whole eggs in with a wooden spoon. Overworking riced potato in a food processor turns it to paste.
- Powdered white sugarIn 1896 this meant finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar is the closest match, and ordinary granulated will dissolve fine in the hot potato.
- The hour's restThis is the hinge. The paste is soft with butter, and the first breading plus an hour of chilling is what lets the croquettes hold their shape in the fat. Refrigerate rather than leaving them at room temperature, and do not shorten the wait.
- Double breadingEgg, crumb, rest, egg, crumb again. With this much butter and sugar inside, a single coat will split and the sugar will leak into the fat and burn.
- Frying"Boiling lard" is the period phrase for fat hot enough to fry briskly; in modern terms that is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Butter alone will brown too fast at that heat; lard, or a neutral oil, is the safer choice. Fry a few at a time so the temperature holds, three to four minutes to a deep gold.
- Yield and servingThe quantity of paste is large, and the number of croquettes will depend entirely on how big you roll the cork shapes. The parsley garnish is period convention; these are sweet, and a dusting of sugar with the lemon suits them better than the herb.
Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf book collects the repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the end of the nineteenth century, and it gives considerable space to potatoes because potatoes were the one vegetable a restaurant had to produce in endless variety. The croquette itself is French in name and method — from croquer, to crunch — and by the 1890s the technique of binding a cooked purée with egg, shaping it, breading it twice and deep-frying it had been applied to almost everything a kitchen had left over. Sweet potato croquettes of this kind, flavoured with lemon zest and sugar, are usually placed in the entremets tradition rather than the meat course; they descend from the older European habit of treating the potato as a base for sweet puddings and beignets, a habit that faded in America as the potato settled firmly into savoury service.<br><br>Note also the finishing instruction: laid on paper to drain, then arranged on ornamental cut paper over a dish. That paper doily is the signature of hotel service in the period, a matter of arranging for the eye as much as the palate.