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Chicken, Lamb, Ham, or Veal Croquettes
2½ cups chicken, lamb, ham, or veal put through food chopper 2 sprigs parsley 1 small sliced onion 1 cup cracker meal 2 tablespoons Mazola 1 cup milk 1 egg and 1 egg white Put the onion and parsley through a food chopper with the meat, add cracker meal and mix. Add beaten egg, 3/4 cup milk and Mazola. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Shape, roll in cracker meal, then in an egg white beaten with 1/4 cup cold milk, then in the meal again, and fry in deep Mazola heated to 375° F.
A leftover-meat croquette from a corn-oil promotional booklet, bound with cracker meal rather than the thick white sauce most croquette recipes of the era used. The method is sound but assumes you know a few things it does not say.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was and is a refined corn oil, sold heavily in this period as a substitute for lard and butter. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works for both the two tablespoons in the mixture and the deep frying.
- Cracker mealFinely crushed unsalted soda crackers or saltines, closer to coarse flour than to breadcrumbs. Panko is too open-textured to bind the mixture, though it will do for the outer coating.
- Use cooked meatThe recipe does not say so, but the 2 1/2 cups going through the food chopper is almost certainly cooked chicken, lamb, ham or veal: roast or boiled leftovers, which is what croquette recipes of the period assumed. Raw ground meat behaves differently and is unlikely to cook through in the few minutes of frying given here.
- Chill before shapingThe one step the recipe omits. Spread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least an hour until firm; warm croquette mixture will not hold a cone or cylinder and tends to burst in the fat.
- Hold back the milkOnly 3/4 cup of the milk goes into the mixture; the remaining 1/4 cup is beaten with the egg white for the coating. Add the milk gradually — cracker meal absorbs unevenly, and a slack mixture cannot be breaded.
- Frying375°F is right, and a thermometer is worth using since the meat is already cooked and you are only browning the crust and heating the centre. Three to four minutes, a few at a time so the oil does not drop below about 350°F. Drain on a rack rather than on paper, which steams the underside.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" needs a firm hand here: cooked meat plus cracker meal is bland. Ham needs almost no salt; chicken and veal want a good deal, and nutmeg, mace or lemon zest suit them, though the recipe itself calls only for salt and pepper.
- YieldAbout twelve croquettes, serving four to six as a luncheon dish. Traditionally served with a cream sauce, tomato sauce or peas.
This comes from the genre of the manufacturer's cookbook, in which a food company published recipes whose only real common thread was its own product — here Mazola, the corn oil introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the early twentieth century and marketed as a clean, economical alternative to lard and butter. Mazola appears twice in a short recipe, once in the mixture and once as the frying medium, which is the point of the exercise. The dish itself is older than the booklet: croquettes were a standard means of turning Sunday's roast into Tuesday's luncheon, and cookery writers of the period treated them less as a recipe than as a formula into which any cold cooked meat could be dropped. That this version binds with cracker meal and milk rather than a stiff béchamel panada makes it the quicker, more domestic of the two approaches — and the reason chilling the mixture thoroughly matters more here than it would with a sauce-bound croquette.