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Preparing Croquettes
A good deal of care and practice are required to make croquettes nicely. The meat must be chopped fine, the ingredients well mixed, and the mixture as moist as possible without preventing the formation. When whapping them take a tablespoonful or so of the mixture, and with both hands work it into the form of cylinder. Handle the mixture as gently as possible, for too much pressure will force the particles apart and spoil the shape. Sprinkle a board lightly with bread or crack-crumbs, and roll the croquettes very gently on this. Allow them to remain on the board until they are finished, when, if any have become flattened, roll them into shape again. Cover a board thickly with crumbs, have some beaten eggs salted slightly, in a deep plate; hold a croquette in the left hand and, with a brush in the right, cover it with the egg; roll it in the crumbs, and keep on doing this until they are covered. Place a few at a time in a frying basket--not allowing them to touch each other--and plunge the basket into boiling fat; cook until they are of a rich brown. Take them up, lay on paper, and let drain.
This is a method page rather than a formula: Oscar assumes you already have a bound, cooked mixture and are ready to shape, crumb and fry it. The instructions still hold, with a few points that the original leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, not fat that is bubbling from water. Work at 360-375F; below that the crumb coat drinks oil and the croquette bursts, above that it colours before the centre is hot.
- Chill before shapingThe instruction to keep the mixture "as moist as possible without preventing the formation" only works if the mixture is thoroughly cold. Spread it in a shallow pan, refrigerate at least two hours, and it will hold a cylinder with almost no pressure.
- "Whapping" is a misprint"Whapping" -- almost certainly a misprint, most likely for "shaping" (or possibly "wrapping"). The sense is clear from what follows: a tablespoon of mixture rolled between both palms into a cylinder.
- "Crack-crumbs"Cracker crumbs, meaning finely crushed plain soda or water crackers. They give a crisper, sandier coat than fresh bread crumbs; dried fine bread crumbs behave much the same way.
- Why the brushBrushing on the egg rather than dunking keeps the soft cylinder from slumping and stops loose crumbs from muddying the egg. Season the egg lightly and thin it with a spoonful of water or oil if it drags.
- Two coats, then restCoating, then rest -- "keep on doing this until they are covered" most likely means repeating the egg-and-crumb routine croquette by croquette until all are coated; some cooks read it as a second pass of egg and crumbs on each. Either way, rest the finished croquettes uncovered in the refrigerator for 30 minutes so the coating sets and seals.
- Basket disciplineFry four or five at a time in a wide pot. Croquettes touching in the basket tear each other's crust, and a crowded basket pulls the fat temperature down sharply.
- Cooking time and donenessSince the filling is already cooked, frying is only about colour and heat: two to three minutes to a deep amber. Drain on a rack over paper rather than flat on paper, which steams the underside soft.
Croquette comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the dish belongs to the same nineteenth-century kitchen logic as rissoles and cutlets: cooked meat, poultry or fish, minced and bound with a stiff bechamel or panada, then crumbed and fried so that the outside is brittle and the inside barely holds together. In a hotel kitchen of the Waldorf's scale the croquette was indispensable, since it turned the trimmings of yesterday's roasts and boiled fowl into a dish that could be shaped in advance by the hundred and fried to order. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, was not himself a cook, and pages like this one read as compiled house practice: the emphasis falls entirely on handling and coating, because those were the steps where a line of apprentices went wrong. The advice to keep the mixture as wet as it can be and still hold shape is the whole art, and it is the same instruction a modern chef gives for a croqueta today.