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Mutton Croquettes, Oriental
Pick off all meat from leg of mutton left over from Saturday and cut it in quarter-inch-square pieces. Finely chop one medium, white onion and one seeded, sound green pepper, place them in saucepan with two tablespoons melted butter and gently fry for five minutes, add the mutton with three ounces well washed and drained raw rice, moisten with pint of broth or water, season with light teaspoon salt, half teaspoon curry powder, saltspoon cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well, cover pan and set in oven for one hour, stirring once in a while. Remove, add two egg yolks and two tablespoons cream, sharply stir on fire while heating for five minutes, remove, transfer into a dish and let cool off. Divide the force in twelve even parts, roll them out on a lightly floured table to croquette shape, dip them in beaten egg, lightly roll in bread crumbs, arrange them in frying basket and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes. Drain well. Pour Finnoise sauce on a hot dish, arrange the croquettes on top and serve.
A leftover-lamb croquette built on a curried rice pilaf, which does most of the binding work. The mixture must be thoroughly cold before shaping or the croquettes will burst in the fat.
- Mutton and quantityMutton — meat from a mature sheep, usually reckoned as over a year old — is rare in the United States; leftover roast leg of lamb behaves much the same way and is milder. The recipe gives no weight for the meat; something in the region of a pound of picked meat suits the 3 oz of rice and the twelve croquettes.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. So a scant 1/4 teaspoon each of cayenne and grated nutmeg, which is assertive but not extreme alongside the half teaspoon of curry powder.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the hour in the oven. Treat it as a moderate oven, 325–350F, covered; the aim is fully cooked rice that has absorbed the pint of liquid and gone slightly sticky.
- The rice mattersUse a medium- or long-grain white rice, not parboiled or instant, and do not rinse the starch away too zealously despite the instruction — that starch plus the egg yolks is the only binder here. Overcooked, softish rice binds better than al dente.
- Cool it completelyAfter the yolks and cream go in, spread the mixture thin on a tray and refrigerate at least two hours, ideally overnight. Warm croquette mixture will not hold its shape and will split open in the fryer.
- Frying timeEight minutes is far too long for a mixture that is already fully cooked. At 350–360F they need 3–4 minutes, until the crumb is deep gold; longer and the crust darkens while the inside dries out.
- Finnoise sauceAn old hotel-kitchen sauce. Period repertoires are not consistent about its make-up, but it belongs to the velouté/suprême family, finished with cream. A cream-enriched chicken velouté is the closest quick equivalent.
- YieldTwelve croquettes, so four servings as a main course with the sauce, six as a first course.
The header "Oriental" in a hotel cookbook of this period is doing what it usually did in professional kitchens: signalling curry powder and rice, the two shorthand markers for anything east of Suez, rather than any particular cuisine. Croquettes themselves are firmly French — from croquer, to crunch — and were a fixture of the professional repertoire precisely because they turned the previous day's roast into a dish that could be plated and sauced with dignity. The instruction to use "leg of mutton left over from Saturday" is the honest part of the recipe, and marks it as a household economy dish dressed in restaurant clothes: mutton was still a common roasting meat in much of the English-speaking world, and a leg was large enough to be expected to stretch over more than one meal.