For Croquettes
1 can or 14 ears corn 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls flour 2 cupfuls milk ½ teaspoonful sugar Pepper and salt to taste 1 egg
This is the binding sauce only — the thick panada that holds chopped cooked meat together before breading and frying. The book assumes you know the method, so the important work is in the ratio and the chilling.
- The ratio is the whole problemTwo tablespoons of flour to two cups of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a croquette binder. A workable panada runs closer to 4 tablespoons each of fat and flour per cup of milk; as written, this mixture must be cooked down hard or it will not hold shape even after chilling.
- Method, since none is givenMelt the fat, stir in the flour and cook a minute without colouring, add the milk gradually and cook until very thick, season, then beat in the egg off the heat so it thickens without scrambling. Fold in about two cups of finely chopped cooked meat.
- CriscoModern Crisco is a reformulated vegetable shortening — the 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, marketed as a butter and lard substitute. Butter is the better choice here for flavour; any solid shortening or oil works mechanically.
- The sugarA teaspoon and a half in a savoury sauce reads oddly now. A little sugar does appear in some period white sauces, though it was by no means universal. It can be halved or dropped without harm.
- Chilling is not optionalSpread the finished mixture in a shallow pan, press plastic wrap onto the surface and refrigerate at least three hours, preferably overnight. Warm croquette paste cannot be shaped and will burst in the fat.
- Breading and fryingFlour, then beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs; rest the coated croquettes twenty minutes before frying. Fry at 375F for two to three minutes — the filling is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust.
- YieldTwo cups of milk plus meat makes roughly twelve croquettes, serving four to six as a main course.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is advertising as much as cookery: the recipes are built to demonstrate that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the kitchen. Croquettes were an ideal showcase. They were a fixture of American middle-class cooking around 1900 — a thrifty way to turn Sunday's leftover chicken, veal or fish into a company dish — and they call on the new fat twice over, once in the roux and again in the deep kettle. The word itself is French, from croquer, to crunch, and the technique of binding minced meat in a stiff white sauce before frying comes out of the same nineteenth-century French professional kitchen that gave American cooks their vocabulary of sauces. That this entry gives quantities and no method suggests the sequence for a white sauce was treated as assumed knowledge.