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June 29
Menu: Beef Croquettes, Brown Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Beets; Fruit Salad; Cheese; Cracker's; Coffee Beef Croquettes-Melt 2 tablespoons Crisco, stir in 1 tablespoon flour, gradually add ½ pint milk, stir till it boils 4 minutes, add salt and pepper to taste; 1/2 pound cold cooked chopped beef and 4 tablespoons breadcrumbs. Turn out on plate to cool. Divide into 8 pieces, flour them and make into neat croquettes. Egg and breadcrumb them. Fry till brown in hot Crisco. Drain and serve hot with brown sauce.
A standard leftover-beef croquette built on a very stiff white sauce. Everything depends on getting that base thick enough and cold enough.
- Chill it properlyThe panada must be refrigerated until firm, not merely "cooled" on a plate for a few minutes. An hour or two in the fridge, or 30 minutes in the freezer, is what keeps the croquettes from bursting in the fat.
- Half a pint of milkOne US cup. With 2 tablespoons fat, 1 tablespoon flour and 4 tablespoons crumbs, the mixture will be softer than a classic croquette paste; if it will not hold a shape when cold, work in more crumbs rather than more flour.
- "Stir till it boils 4 minutes"Means four minutes at a simmer after it comes to the boil, to cook out the raw flour. Stir constantly; a sauce this thick catches on the pan bottom quickly.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so every fat is Crisco. Any neutral solid or liquid frying fat works: vegetable shortening, refined peanut or canola oil, or lard for the roux.
- Frying temperatureNo temperature is given; the recipe says only "hot Crisco." Period cookery books commonly judged fat by how fast a cube of bread browned. Use 365-375F. Below that the crumb coat drinks fat; above it the outside colours before the centre is hot.
- Egg and breadcrumb themFlour, then beaten egg (loosened with a teaspoon of water), then fine dry crumbs. A second pass through egg and crumbs is worth the trouble on a soft filling. Rest the coated croquettes 15 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Brown sauceIn 1913 this meant a flour-and-fat brown roux let down with beef stock, seasoned and strained; a good pan gravy or a jarred demi-glace serves the same purpose.
- YieldEight croquettes, which is two apiece for four people as a light main course with a vegetable.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold from 1911 as a shortening that was neither butter nor lard. Its "Calendar of Dinners" gave a full year of menus, one dish flowing into the next, and croquettes were an obvious inclusion, of a sort: they are frugal cookery, a way of turning Sunday's cold roast into Tuesday's hot dinner, and they need a great deal of frying fat, which was precisely the point. The name comes from the French croquer, to crunch; bound croquettes of chopped meat in a thick sauce were a fixture of nineteenth-century French service that American household writers adopted wholesale, and by the 1900s a page of them was a common feature of general cookbooks.