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Potato and Nut Croquettes
2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls riced potatoes 1 tablespoonful milk Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste Few drops onion juice 1 egg and 1 yolk of egg 1/3 cupful chopped nut meats 1/4 cupful cream 1/4 cupful breadcrumbs Mix potatoes with Crisco, milk, yolk of egg, onion juice and seasonings, and mix well. Put cream and breadcrumbs into small saucepan and stir to thick paste, then cool; now add nuts, salt and pepper to taste and half yolk of egg. Inclose some of nut mixture in potato mixture, making ingredients into neat croquettes. Beat up remainder of egg with tablespoonful of water. Roll croquettes in fine breadcrumbs, brush over with egg, and again roll in crumbs. Fry in hot Crisco to golden brown, then drain. Crisco should be heated until a crumb of bread becomes a golden brown in forty seconds. Serve hot decorated with parsley. Sufficient for eight croquettes. ½ cupful Crisco ¼ lb. chopped onions
A straightforward stuffed croquette: seasoned riced potato wrapped around a nut-and-breadcrumb paste, breaded twice and deep-fried. The book's job is to sell shortening, so Crisco appears in three roles; only the frying fat is structurally important.
- The hinge: chill before fryingThe recipe never says to rest the shaped croquettes, but potato croquettes that go straight from hand to fat tend to burst. Twenty to thirty minutes in the refrigerator after the final crumbing firms the coating and keeps the filling in.
- Sorting out the eggsYou need one whole egg plus one extra yolk. The recipe's division of them is not spelled out: the extra yolk appears to go into the potato, "half yolk of egg" into the nut paste, and whatever is left, beaten with a tablespoon of water, becomes the wash. In practice it is simpler to put the extra yolk in the potato, a spoonful of beaten egg in the nut paste, and use the rest as wash.
- Riced potatoesTwo cupfuls of riced potato is roughly 1 lb of potatoes, baked or boiled in their skins and pressed hot through a ricer. Mash them in a bowl with a masher and they turn gluey; the ricer is what keeps the interior light.
- Fat temperatureThe bread test given here, a crumb of bread golden in forty seconds, is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 365-375F. A thermometer is quicker and steadier.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; the modern product has been reformulated. Any neutral frying fat or oil works, and butter is fine for the two tablespoons that go into the potato.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture: grate an onion on a fine grater and use the liquid, or press grated onion in a sieve. A few drops means a very small quantity, well under a quarter teaspoon.
- The nut fillingThe cream and crumbs are cooked to a thick paste so the filling holds together when enclosed. Cool it properly, or it will soften the potato shell as you shape. Walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts all suit.
- The stray last line"1/2 cupful Crisco 14 lb. chopped onions" does not belong to this recipe; it is a fragment of an adjacent one run on in error. Ignore it.
- YieldEight croquettes, which is a main course for three or four with a green vegetable, or a side for eight.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and it is a promotional cookbook in the fullest sense: several hundred recipes, nearly all of which call for the product. Meatless cookery was a genuine selling point rather than mere padding, since a shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil contained no animal fat and no dairy, which mattered to vegetarians and to kosher households alike; Crisco was marketed to both. The croquette itself is older and entirely conventional for the period, when a nut-and-crumb filling was a standard way of giving a meatless dish the richness and the sense of a centre that a chop or a cutlet would otherwise supply. Deep-fried croquettes were everywhere in Anglo-American cooking between roughly 1880 and the 1930s, and they have since largely fallen out of use.