Croquettes
1 egg 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Few grains nutmeg 1/3 cup bread crumbs 1/2 tablespoon Karo, Blue Label 1/3 cup hot milk Fine, dry bread crumbs Soak the crumbs in the milk five minutes. Combine with the steak, the apple put through the food chopper, the Karo, egg yolk and seasonings. Form into small balls, a scant tablespoonful each, roll in fine dry crumbs, then in the egg white slightly beaten and mixed with one-third cup cold milk, then in the crumbs again, and fry in deep Mazola heated to 350 degrees F., or until a bit of bread will brown in sixty counts. Drain on crumpled paper and serve with Tomato Sauce.
This is a leftover-beef croquette from a corn-products advertising booklet, and the ingredient list is incomplete as printed: the method calls for steak and apple that never appear above it. Read the whole method before shopping.
- The missing quantitiesNo amount is given for either the steak or the apple. The binder here (1/3 cup crumbs, one egg yolk, 1/3 cup milk) will carry roughly a cup to a cup and a half of finely ground cooked beef plus one medium tart apple. Treat those figures as reconstruction, not as the original's intent.
- Karo, Blue LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded grades; a light corn syrup stands in for it without argument. At half a tablespoon it is too little to sweeten the mixture noticeably, and corn syrup does encourage browning.
- MazolaStill corn oil, and still sold. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works for deep frying at this temperature.
- The 60-count bread testThe stated 350F is the number to trust. A cube of bread browning in about a minute is the period's way of confirming it; a thermometer is faster and does not drift as the oil recovers between batches.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve. Grated onion pulp itself will do, though it loosens the mixture slightly.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked grinder. A food processor pulsed a few times gives the same result for the apple; do not puree it, or the mixture will be too wet to shape.
- Chill before breadingNot in the original, which moves straight from mixing to shaping. A soft crumb-and-milk-bound meat mixture is prone to bursting in hot fat, so refrigerating the shaped balls for half an hour, and again after breading, is worth doing.
- The double coatingCrumbs, then egg white thinned with milk, then crumbs again, exactly as the recipe directs. The first crumb layer would help dry the surface so the egg wash clings evenly.
- Draining and yieldCrumpled paper means absorbent paper, or better a rack set over a tray so the undersides stay crisp. Yield cannot be fixed, since the original gives no quantity for either the steak or the apple.
Croquettes were the standard nineteenth- and early twentieth-century answer to yesterday's roast: grind the cold meat, bind it, crumb it and fry it, and it reappears as a dish in its own right. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the whole point is the contrast between the crisp shell and the soft interior. This version belongs to a genre of promotional cookery booklets published by manufacturers, in this case built around Karo corn syrup and Mazola corn oil, both products of the corn-refining industry that expanded rapidly in the United States after 1900. Such books are generally understood to have worked their sponsor's brands into as many recipes as possible, which may account for the small quantity of corn syrup in a savoury beef croquette.