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Kaden Boutou, Mutton Croquettes with Rice
Place in a saucepan one small chopped onion, with half a sound, seeded green pepper and a tablespoon melted butter, and fry five minutes. Add two ounces rice with one peeled, crushed, red tomato, half pint broth, teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; lightly mix, cover pan, then set in oven thirty-five minutes. Remove, finely chop one and a half pounds raw lean mutton, place in a large bowl, adding half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne, saltspoon grated nutmeg, saltspoon ground mixed spices and two egg yolks. Sharply stir with spatula until well thickened, then add the rice with two eggs; sharply stir with wooden spoon for four minutes, let stand five minutes in a cool place. Roll preparation on a lightly floured table into twelve even, pear-shaped pieces. Plunge in boiling water and simmer ten minutes. Lift up with the skimmer, thoroughly drain, then dip in beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs, place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat ten minutes. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with parsley greens and serve with a Madeira sauce separately.
A Turkish rice-and-meat croquette written down in Edwardian restaurant shorthand. The unusual step here is that the shaped croquettes are poached in water before they are crumbed and fried, which sets them without a flour binder.
- Saltspoon and half pintA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon. Half a pint is one cup of broth, and two ounces of rice is a scant third of a cup by volume.
- The unnamed ovenNo temperature is given for the covered rice. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable reading; thirty-five minutes should leave the rice soft enough to bind the meat.
- MuttonTrue mutton, from a sheep over two years old, is rare in supermarkets. Boneless lamb shoulder is the closest substitute and its fat content suits the mixture; trim hard sinew before chopping.
- Chop, do not grindHand-chopping with a heavy knife or two passes through the coarse plate of a grinder gives the texture the recipe expects. A food processor turns a pound and a half of lamb into paste, and the croquettes go dense.
- Ground mixed spicesThis is the period's mixed spice: chiefly cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg and clove. A quarter teaspoon of any warm baking-spice blend covers it, and allspice alone is fine.
- Poach gentlyBring the water to a boil, then drop to a bare simmer before adding the croquettes. At a rolling boil they knock together and break apart. Ten minutes at a simmer firms them through.
- Frying time"Boiling fat" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350-375F. Ten minutes at that heat risks scorching the crumbs, since the poaching has already largely cooked the interior; three to four minutes, until deep gold, should be enough.
- Yield and serviceTwelve croquettes serve four as a main course. The folded napkin was a Victorian device for absorbing frying fat on the platter; paper towels do the job less decoratively. Madeira sauce is a brown sauce finished with the wine, served in a boat alongside.
The name is a transliteration of the Turkish kadınbudu köfte, literally "lady's thigh meatball," a name often said to derive from the plump tapered shape the recipe asks for when it says "pear-shaped." The dish is a familiar one in Turkish home cooking: half the meat cooked, half raw, bound with rice and egg, then given a crisp coat. Its appearance in an American cookbook of this vintage belongs to a wider fashion for the "international" table, in which hotel chefs collected dishes from Constantinople, Vienna and New Orleans and rewrote them all in the same clipped professional idiom, down to the obligatory Madeira sauce and folded napkin. The Turkish original is not usually poached first, nor served with a French sauce; both are the compiler's kitchen speaking rather than the dish's homeland.