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Shrimp Croquettes
Shell a pint of cooked shrimps, then cut them into small pieces. Peel and thoroughly wash three medium, raw potatoes, boil them in a quart of water with teaspoon salt forty minutes. Drain, then press through a potato masher into a sauteuse, add the shrimps with an ounce of butter; two egg yolks, one light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; stir with the spatula until well amalgamated, then stir on the fire while cooking five minutes. Remove, place in a vessel and let cool a little. Then divide it into twelve even parts, roll them out on a lightly floured table to croquette shape. Lightly dip in beaten egg, then roll them in bread crumbs, arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat eight minutes. Lift them up, drain. Place on a dish in the folds of a napkin, decorate with a little parsley and serve.
A plain potato-and-shrimp croquette from an era when the frying kettle did most of the work. Two things need adjusting: the frying time and the chilling.
- Chill the mixture properlyThe recipe says to cool it "a little." Croquettes that go into hot fat warm and soft will split. Spread the mixture on a tray and refrigerate at least an hour, then shape, coat and chill again for thirty minutes before frying.
- A pint of shrimpVolume, not weight, and by the wording measured before shelling, so the yield of meat will be appreciably less than a pint once picked. Small shrimp are right here since they are chopped anyway.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons of white pepper is 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for a bland potato base, and the nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon.
- SauteuseA shallow pan with a flat bottom; any wide heavy saucepan does. It matters only because you want surface area to drive moisture off the potato in that five-minute stir.
- Frying timeEight minutes is far too long for something already cooked through. At 360-375F the croquettes brown in 2 to 3 minutes; leave them longer and the crumb blackens and the interior bursts. "Boiling fat" in this book means fat at frying heat, not fat literally boiling.
- The potatoesForty minutes suits whole medium potatoes; test with a knife. Use a floury variety, drain them very dry, and rice them rather than mash " wet or gluey potato is the usual reason a croquette collapses.
- Egg yolks bind, not thickenAdd them off the heat first, mix, then return to the fire. Stirred into a hot pan directly they scramble in threads.
- YieldTwelve croquettes, four servings as a first course or a light lunch with lemon and a green salad.
Croquettes were a fixture of professional American cooking around 1900 in part because they used up cooked meat, fish or shellfish that could not be sent out a second time in its original form; the name comes from the French croquer, to crunch. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the vocabulary here " sauteuse, spatula, frying basket, the finished dish sent up "in the folds of a napkin" " is restaurant vocabulary transplanted into a domestic book. The napkin may not have been decoration alone: it is often suggested that it absorbed the last of the frying fat, a habit from the days before absorbent paper was standard in a kitchen.