No. 893

Sweetbread Croquettes

Croquettes de ris de Veau

Braise, then set aside to cool, one pound of sweetbreads, cut them into three-sixteenths inch squares, have also three-quarters of a pound of cooked mushrooms cut the same. Put into a sautoir one quart of veloute (No. 415) well seasoned with salt, black and red pepper and nutmeg, and thicken the sauce with four raw egg-yolks diluted with half a gill of cream and two ounces of fine butter; add the sweetbreads and mushrooms, set it on the fire and continue to stir until it boils, then pour this preparation into a vessel to get thoroughly cold. Divide it so as to make it into cork-shaped pieces, which roll in beaten eggs, and fry a fine color; drain; dress them pyramidically on folded napkins and decorate with fried parsley.

← No. 892 Woodcock Croquettes with Truffles Hot Side Dishes No. 894 Turkey Croquettes →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic croquette built on a thick velouté bound with egg yolks; the sweetbreads and mushrooms are folded into it as garnish rather than the other way round. Nothing here is difficult, but the mixture must be genuinely cold before shaping or the croquettes will burst in the fat.

The hinge: chill it hardRanhofer says "pour this preparation into a vessel to get thoroughly cold" and means it. Spread it no more than an inch deep on a tray, cover, and refrigerate at least four hours or overnight; a soft, warm panade cannot be rolled and will split open in the fryer.
Buying and preparing the sweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads are the ones intended (sold as throat/thymus or heart/pancreas; the recipe does not say which); order them from a butcher. Soak in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch, cool, peel away membrane and press flat under a weighted plate before braising, then dice at about 5 mm as directed.
Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons (60 ml). Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
Velouté No. 415Velouté here means the velouté of recipe No. 415, which should be consulted for the stock rather than assumed. A quart of good chicken-stock velouté, cooked until it coats a spoon heavily, stands in acceptably. It should be thicker than a sauce you would serve on its own.
Boiling the egg-yolk liaisonThe instruction to stir until it boils looks wrong by modern sauce practice, and would curdle a thin sauce, but the flour in the velouté protects the yolks. Stir constantly over moderate heat and let it come only just to the boil, then take it off.
BreadingRolling in beaten egg alone gives no crust; croquettes elsewhere in the book are dipped in beaten egg and then bread-crumbs, which is plainly what is intended here. Use fine dry white crumbs; a preliminary dusting of flour is modern practice rather than the book's. Chill the breaded croquettes 30 minutes before frying.
Frying"Fry a fine color" gives no temperature; the book states none. Modern practice for croquettes of this kind is deep fat at 350-375F (175-190C), two to three minutes, in small batches so the temperature holds. The interior is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust and heating through.
Fried parsleyDry curly parsley sprigs thoroughly, then drop into the same fat for 10-15 seconds until crisp and still green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
YieldA pound of sweetbreads, three-quarters of a pound of mushrooms and a quart of sauce make roughly 24 to 30 cork-shaped croquettes, enough for eight to ten as a side dish or first course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, where he was chef for over thirty years, and its hundreds of numbered, cross-referenced recipes assume a brigade with stockpots already going, hence the bare reference to "veloute (No. 415)." Croquettes of this kind were a standard entree volante or hot side dish on nineteenth-century French-American menus: a way of turning a small quantity of expensive cooked meat into a generous-looking dish by suspending it in a stiff bound sauce. Sweetbreads carried real prestige on such menus, ranked with truffles and terrapin, and appear repeatedly through this section; the neighbouring numbers for woodcock and turkey croquettes show how interchangeable the method was. The pyramid on a folded napkin with fried parsley is pure service a la francaise of the period, when a side dish was expected to be built rather than simply plated.