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Potato Croquettes with Spinach
Boil four good-sized, peeled potatoes in two quarts water with teaspoon salt for thirty minutes, drain, then press them through a potato masher into a saucepan, add two egg yolks, half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and sharply stir on the fire for two minutes. Pick off the stalks and any stale leaves adhering to a pint of fresh, very green spinach, thoroughly wash in running water, drain on a sieve, plunge them in quart of boiling water in a small saucepan with half teaspoon salt and boil for ten minutes, place on a sieve and press them with a skimmer to press out all the water, finely chop and add to the potatoes and briskly stir for one minute. Roll out the preparation on a lightly floured table in twelve equal, cork-shaped pieces, lightly dip in beaten egg, then roll them in bread crumbs. Arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes, remove, drain, dress on a folded napkin and serve.
A straightforward French-style croquette, but two of its timings belong to an era before anyone worried about waterlogged vegetables or greasy frying. Read the frying note before you start.
- Fry hot and fastEight minutes in deep fat will darken the crumb coating well past brown and drive oil into the interior. At 375F these are done in two to three minutes, just long enough to set the crust and heat a filling that is already cooked.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is a generous three-quarters teaspoon of pepper for four potatoes. That is assertive by modern standards; start with half and taste.
- A pint of spinachSpinach here is measured by volume as picked-over leaves, which is only a couple of ounces by weight: a small amount of green against four potatoes. Ten minutes of boiling reduces it to grey mush; thirty to sixty seconds in the boiling water is enough to wilt it and hold the colour.
- Press it genuinely dryThis is the hinge. Wet spinach makes a slack mixture that splits in the fat. After squeezing with the skimmer, wring the chopped spinach in a towel until no more water comes out.
- Choose the right potatoUse a floury variety such as russet. Waxy potatoes go gluey when mashed and will not hold a cork shape. Drying the drained potatoes in the pan over low heat for a minute before mashing helps further.
- "Sharply stir on the fire"The two minutes over heat after the yolks go in is cooking the egg into the potato so the paste binds. Keep the heat low and the spoon moving or the yolk scrambles.
- Chill before shapingNot in the original, but the mixture handles far better cold. Spread it on a tray, cool it fully, then roll the twelve cylinders and crumb them.
- Yield and servingTwelve croquettes, enough for four as a side or three as a light main. The folded napkin was a service convention for absorbing fat; a rack over paper does the same work.
The croquette takes its name from the French croquer, to crunch, and by the late nineteenth century it was one of the standard ways a professional kitchen turned yesterday's cooked potato, fish or poultry into something that could be sent out looking deliberate. The cork shape specified here was one of a small vocabulary of croquette forms taught in French kitchens alongside pears, balls and cylinders. This book belongs to an era of hotel and restaurant cookery that took much of its grammar from France, which is why a dish of mashed potato and spinach arrives with a folded napkin and a frying basket. Spinach paired with potato in this way is often said to have been an economy: a small quantity of a bright, cheap green colours and flavours a much larger quantity of starch.