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Oyster Croquettes
Scald and chop fine hard part of the oysters (after taking the other part and liquor for a soup), add an equal weight of mashed potato; to one pound of this add lump of butter the size of an egg, tea-spoon salt, half tea-spoon of pepper, and quarter of a tea-cup cream. Make in small cakes, dip in egg and then in bread-crumbs, and fry like doughnuts.
A thrifty use for the tough muscle of the oyster after the tender bellies and liquor have gone into soup. The recipe assumes you already know how to deep-fry, and gives its measurements in the loose kitchen units of the period.
- The hinge: keep the mixture dry and coldWet mashed potato and a slack mix will burst in the fat. Use floury potatoes, riced or mashed with no milk beyond the small amount of cream called for, and chill the shaped cakes at least half an hour before breading and frying.
- "Hard part of the oysters"This is the firm adductor muscle and the tougher mantle edge, as distinct from the soft belly. Shucked oysters today are sold whole; simply chop the whole oyster fine and accept a slightly richer croquette, or reserve the bellies and liquor for the soup as the book intends.
- ScaldingBring the oysters just to the point where the edges ruffle, no more than a minute or two in their own liquor. Anything longer and the muscle turns to rubber before it ever reaches the fat.
- Lump of butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Quarter of a tea-cup of creamPeriod teacups were reckoned at anything from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so this is somewhere between 2 and 3 tablespoons. Add it last and only as needed; the mixture should just hold together.
- Equal weight of mashed potatoWeigh the chopped oyster meat after scalding and match it. One pound of the combined mixture is the base for the seasoning quantities given, so scale the butter, salt, pepper and cream accordingly.
- "Fry like doughnuts"Deep fat at 365-375F, turning once, until the crumbs are deep gold, roughly 2-3 minutes. The filling is already cooked, so you are browning the coating and nothing more.
- YieldA pound of mixture makes about a dozen small cakes, enough for four as a first course with lemon or a tartare sauce.
Croquettes were everywhere in late nineteenth-century American cookery, a French technique that suited the era's fondness for turning yesterday's protein into today's dish. This one is doubly economical: it presumes the cook has already made an oyster soup and treats the leftover muscle, too tough to be pleasant on its own, as raw material. Oysters were cheap and abundant along the Gulf and the Atlantic seaboard for most of the century, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, and a book like The Dixie Cook Book could assume its readers ate them regularly rather than as a luxury. The instruction to "fry like doughnuts" is a good marker of the period's shorthand: deep frying in a kettle of hot lard was so routine a household operation that no temperature, time or quantity of fat needed stating.