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Baked Meat or Fish Croquettes
Prepare the mixture as described, shape and dip in fine dry bread crumbs mixed with one-half cup Mazola to one and one-half cups crumbs. Bake in a hot oven, 375 degrees F. till brown.
This is a variant instruction, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the croquette mixture (a thick white-sauce base bound with cooked minced meat or flaked fish, chilled firm) given elsewhere in the book. What it adds is the oven method in place of the deep fryer.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was and is refined corn oil, and the brand name printed into the method suggests a manufacturer-sponsored book. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works identically here; the point of the ingredient is that it coats the crumbs so they brown without frying.
- The oiled-crumb ratioHalf a cup of oil to one and a half cups of dry crumbs gives a damp, sandy mixture rather than a paste. Toss the two together thoroughly before breading so the fat is evenly distributed, or the croquettes will brown in patches.
- Chill the mixture hardThis is the hinge. A croquette base must be refrigerated until it is firm enough to shape and hold its shape, several hours or overnight. Warm, slack mixture slumps and splits in the oven, and there is no hot fat to set a crust instantly the way frying would.
- 375F is not a hot ovenThe book calls 375F "hot"; by modern convention that is moderately hot, with "hot" usually meaning 425-450F. Follow the number, not the adjective. On a rack set in a shallow pan, expect 20-25 minutes for croquettes the size of a large egg.
- Egg wash still helpsPeriod croquette recipes commonly breaded with crumbs, then beaten egg, then crumbs again. Dipping in beaten egg before the oiled crumbs gives a crust that clings; oiled crumbs pressed onto a bare surface tend to shed.
- The filling is already cookedCroquette mixtures use cooked meat or cooked, flaked fish, so the oven is only browning the exterior and heating the interior through. Do not extend the time hoping to cook raw filling; use cooked meat as intended.
This page belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the branded cookbook issued by a manufacturer, in this case for Mazola, the corn oil marketed by the Corn Products Refining Company from the 1910s onward. Such books existed to demonstrate that a new industrial fat could stand in for butter, lard and suet across the whole repertoire, which is why a recipe as ordinary as croquettes gets its own entry with the brand name printed in the method. The baked variant is itself a small piece of period argument. Croquettes were classically deep-fried, a fussy and fat-hungry operation, and offering an oven version aimed straight at the home cook who did not want a kettle of frying fat on the stove; the oiled crumb coating is the trick that lets the oven approximate a fried crust. Croquettes had reached American luncheon tables from French cookery, where croquette derives from croquer, to crunch, and they earned their place in household books as the respectable way to serve up yesterday's roast or boiled fish.</invoke>