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Green Pea Croquettes
When green peas are growing a little old for the table, shell sufficient to measure one pint. Boil them in just sufficient salted water to cover until quite tender, then drain and press through a sieve. In a saucepan melt one tablespoonful of butter, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, a little more than half of a teaspoonful of salt and one-quarter of a teaspoontul of white pepper. When mixed, add the prepared peas and seven drops of onion juice and stir until thickened. Add the yolk of one beaten egg, stir for half a minute longer and take from the fire. Taste and add more seasoning if necessary; then spread on a platter and set away to get cold and firm. Slightly flour the hands and form small spoonfuls of the mixture into croquettes. Dip each into slightly beaten egg, roll in sifted bread crumbs and immerse in smoking hot fat until golden brown. Drain on unglazed paper and serve with a cream sauce.
Dried green peas may also be made into croquettes.
Pick them over and soak over night, tie loosely in a piece of cheese cloth and boil slowly in water until very soft; then drain and finish as above.
A stiff pea panade, chilled hard, shaped and fried. Everything depends on the mixture being dry and cold enough to hold its shape in the fat.
- The hinge: chill it properlySpread the hot mixture no more than half an inch deep and refrigerate at least two hours, until it is genuinely firm and cuttable. A croquette shaped from barely-cool paste will burst in the fryer and leave you with pea soup in the oil.
- A pint of peasThat is a pint of shelled peas, roughly 10-12 oz, which takes about 2 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas work, though they are picked young and sweet rather than starchy like the peas the recipe describes.
- Onion juiceSeven drops is not fussiness for its own sake; onion juice was a common seasoning of the period, got by grating a halved onion on a fine grater and pressing the pulp. Grate and squeeze a piece of onion and use about a sixteenth of a teaspoon -- seven drops is a very small amount.
- "Smoking hot fat"Read this as about 375F, deep enough to float the croquettes. The lard and drippings a cook of this period would have used smoke at a lower temperature than modern refined oils, so do not take "smoking" literally with peanut or canola oil.
- Unglazed paperBrown paper or a paper bag, used because glazed paper would not absorb. Paper towels or a wire rack over a tray do the job.
- Cream sauceA plain white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, a cup of milk or light cream, salt and white pepper. The croquette mixture is built the same way but bound with the pea puree instead of milk, so keep this sauce loose enough to pour.
- The dried-pea versionStart with about a cup of dried green peas, soaked overnight, and expect an hour or more of slow simmering. The cheesecloth keeps them from breaking up and clouding the water; drain very well before sieving, since the finished paste must be no wetter than the fresh version.
- YieldOne to two dozen small croquettes, enough for four to six as a side dish or a light supper course with the sauce.
Croquettes were one of the workhorses of the late nineteenth-century American table, a respectable way to turn a small quantity of vegetable, fish or leftover meat into something that looked like a made dish. This one is frankly an economy recipe: it opens by telling you what to do with peas that have gone starchy and lost their sweetness on the vine, the point at which they were no longer fit to serve buttered. The technique is a domesticated version of French practice, a thick panade bound with egg yolk, chilled, breaded and deep fried, and it appears in general cookbooks of the period in a number of variants. The dried-pea alternative at the end shows the same dish shifted into winter, when nothing green was to be had. Small croquettes did turn up at luncheons and teas alongside sandwich plates.