Home › Supper › Macaroni and Cheese Croquettes
Macaroni and Cheese Croquettes
3 cups chopped cooked macaroni 2 tablespoons Mazola Few grains dry mustard 1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce 3 tablespoons Argo or Kings- 3/4 cup milk ford's Cornstarch 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/2 cup grated American cheese 1 egg Make a sauce of the Mazola, cornstarch, seasonings and milk. Add the cheese and cook over hot water until it has melted. the cheese and cook over hot water until it has melted.
The sauce will be very thick. Add to the macaroni with the egg yolk. Chill and form into balls. Roll in fine dry bread crumbs, then in the egg white slightly beaten with one-third cup cold water, then in crumbs again and fry golden brown in deep Mazola hot enough to brown a bit of bread in forty counts, 375 degrees F. Drain on crumpled paper.
GIVEN a good recipe and the right ingredients, any one can make a successful cake. It is almost impossible to achieve this with ordinary bread flour; it contains to achieve this with ordinary bread flour; it contains too much gluten, which makes the texture coarse.
This can be overcome if two tablespoonfuls of Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch are sifted with each scant cupful of flour the texture will be even and fine. Fine texture also depends partly on thorough mixing. should blend quickly and completely. Mazola does this The shortening because it is pure liquid pressed from the hearts of corn.
A corn-products promotional recipe: the sauce is a very stiff cornstarch panade rather than a flour roux, which is what allows the croquettes to hold together. The paragraph about cake flour at the end belongs to the advertising copy and has nothing to do with the croquettes.
- MazolaCorn oil, named here (as elsewhere in the booklet) because the collection was published to sell it. Use any neutral oil for both the sauce and the frying.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch. Three tablespoons to three-quarters cup milk gives a paste stiff enough to stand a spoon in; that is intentional and correct.
- Cook over hot waterA double boiler. Cornstarch scorches and turns grainy over direct heat, and the mixture is too thick to stir freely in a thin pan. A bowl over simmering water works.
- Grated American cheeseIn the usage of the period this generally means a firm domestic cheddar rather than the processed slice. Use a sharp or medium cheddar and grate it fine so it melts into the paste.
- The chill is the hingeThe mixture needs to be cold and firm all the way through before shaping; the recipe gives no time, so allow it a good few hours in the cold. Warm croquettes burst in the fat.
- Egg handlingThe yolk is stirred into the mixture along with the macaroni; the white thinned with a third cup of water is the dip. Double crumbing, dip, crumb again, is what seals them.
- Frying temperature375F, as the original says. The forty-count bread test is a fair rough gauge but a thermometer is better; a drop below about 350F and the coating soaks oil.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 croquettes, four servings as a supper dish with a green salad or stewed tomatoes.
This comes from a corn-products cookery booklet, the sort of promotional recipe collection given away or sold cheaply by manufacturers in the first decades of the twentieth century; the recipes name brand products, and the closing paragraph about gluten and cake texture is straightforward advertising that the printer set continuous with the recipe. Croquettes themselves were a staple of American supper and luncheon menus in this period, valued precisely because they turned leftovers into something that could be sent to table looking deliberate, and cooked macaroni was a common candidate. The cornstarch binding is the commercial angle: it lets the booklet claim a use for its product in a dish that was often said to be bound with a thick flour-based sauce, and it does in fact set firmer than flour, which suits a croquette that has to survive the fat.