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Royal Sweetbread Croquettes
Put three small or two large sweetbreads into boiling water for five minutes. Chop them finely with one boiled boned chicken, adding one teaspoonful of onion juice, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley and one teaspoonful of mace. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into a saucepan with one large tablespoonful of flour; when it bubbles add one pint of cream, the chopped mixture, and stir all together thoroughly until well heated. Remove from the fire, add the juice of half a lemon and set on one side to cool. Roll the mixture into shapes and dip them into beaten eggs and then into fine cracker-crumbs. Let the croquettes stand until dry, dip them again in egg and finally in breadcrumbs. All the crumbs should first be salted and peppered. Fry quickly in boiling fat and serve.
A Gilded Age croquette in the grand manner: sweetbreads and poached chicken bound in a cream sauce, chilled, breaded twice and deep fried. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to handle sweetbreads and how thick a croquette panade needs to be, so both need spelling out.
- The binding is the hingeOne tablespoon of flour and two of butter will not set a pint of cream into anything you can roll. Expect to use roughly 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a pint, cooked out for a minute or two before the cream goes in, and simmer the finished mixture until it pulls away from the pan in a mass. Spread it on a tray, chill it hard for at least three hours, and it will shape.
- Preparing sweetbreadsSoak them in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they blanch pale, then poach in barely simmering salted water with a splash of lemon. Five minutes only firms the surface; give them 15 to 20 minutes depending on size, then cool under a weighted plate and peel away the outer membrane and any tubes before chopping.
- What to buyVeal sweetbreads are what the Waldorf meant. Butchers sell two kinds: the 'throat' sweetbread, which is the thymus, and the plumper 'heart' or 'kernel' sweetbread, which is properly the pancreas; ask for the kernel, which is less ragged and easier to trim. Three small or two large is somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 lb.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A teaspoon takes about half a small onion.
- MaceA full teaspoon of ground mace is assertive by current taste. Half a teaspoon of freshly ground blade mace is closer to what most cooks will want, and nutmeg is a fair stand-in at slightly less.
- Frying"Boiling fat" means deep fat hot enough to brown a crumb of bread briskly, in modern terms somewhere around 350-375F. Fry a few croquettes at a time so the temperature holds, until deep gold. The filling is already cooked, so you are only crisping and heating through.
- The double coatingEgg, cracker crumb, dry, egg again, then fine breadcrumbs. The resting between coats is not optional; it is what keeps the shell from splitting and flooding the fat with cream sauce. Chill the breaded croquettes again before they go in.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly 16 to 18 croquettes of the usual cork or pear shape, enough for eight as a first course. Traditionally served with green peas or a mushroom sauce.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name sold this 1896 book, was not a cook but the man who set the tone of the Waldorf's dining rooms, and the volume reads like the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen written down for domestic use. Croquettes were everywhere in that repertoire: they turned expensive cooked meat into an elegant, uniform, plated portion that could be shaped in advance and fried to order, which is exactly what a hotel needs. Sweetbreads occupied a place in American restaurant cooking around 1900 that is hard to imagine now, appearing braised, larded, in patties and in croquettes on menu after menu. "Royal" here is menu language rather than any claim of provenance, the same impulse that produced à la reine and à la royale on hundreds of American bills of fare in the period, usually signalling nothing more precise than cream, white meat and expense.