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Trenton Eggs
Chop up fine one dozen hard-boiled eggs; add salt, pepper, chopped parsley and a pint of cream sauce, mingling all well together. Roll this preparation into balls the size of an egg; dip them first into flour, then into beaten raw egg, and lastly in breadcrumbs, and fry in very hot fat. Dress the croquettes on a bed of mashed sweet potatoes, and pour a little tomato sauce around.
A hard-boiled egg croquette, standard hotel-kitchen work of the 1890s. The recipe leaves out the one step that decides whether it succeeds.
- Chill the mixture firstThe bound egg mixture will not roll into balls while warm — it slumps and bursts in the fat. Spread it in a shallow pan, cover, and refrigerate until firm, at least two hours, before shaping.
- Make the cream sauce thickA pint of thin béchamel to twelve eggs gives a paste too loose to hold. Aim for a stiff binding sauce — at least 4 tbsp butter and 4 tbsp flour to the pint of milk, and more if it still slumps — cooked until it pulls away from the pan.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature; "very hot fat" is conventionally read today as somewhere in the region of 375°F. Below that the crumbs soak; much above and the coating colours before the centre warms through. Two to three minutes is enough — the filling is already cooked.
- BreadingFlour, egg, crumbs as written, but let the breaded balls rest 20–30 minutes in the refrigerator before frying so the coating sets. A second pass through egg and crumbs on any thin spots is cheap insurance against a blowout.
- Cream sauceIn period usage "cream sauce" usually means a milk-based white sauce rather than a sauce made from heavy cream. Season it well; twelve eggs absorb a great deal of salt.
- YieldTwelve eggs and a pint of sauce make a large quantity of mixture — probably eighteen to twenty croquettes at the recipe's stated egg size, enough for six or more as a luncheon dish and more as a first course.
- The sweet potato bedMash the sweet potatoes stiff and hot, with butter and a little salt only. A wet or sugared purée turns the plate into soup under the tomato sauce.
Croquettes of this kind were a fixture of American hotel and club cookery around 1900, valued because they turned leftovers and cheap staples into something that could be plated with a sauce and sent out of a large kitchen quickly. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's famous maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 collection, published a good many of them — chicken, lobster, rice, sweet potato — and the egg version is the humblest of the group. The place-name titles scattered through the book (Trenton, Newport, Saratoga) followed a common hotel convention: while some, such as Saratoga, do carry a documented local association, many were understood to flatter a city, a patron or a house speciality rather than to record any local origin, and there is no evidence connecting this dish to Trenton beyond the label on the menu card.