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Meat Croquettes
Use cold roast beef, chop it fine; season with salt and pepper; add one-third the quantity of bread crumbs, moisten with one egg well beaten and a little milk. Have your hands floured; rub the meat into balls, dip into beaten egg, then into fine pulverized bread crumbs and fry in butter or fine chopped suet salted and hot.
A leftovers recipe with no measurements, no yield and no binding beyond egg and milk. It works, but the proportions need judgment.
- ProportionsRoughly three parts finely chopped cooked beef to one part soft breadcrumbs by volume. One beaten egg plus a tablespoon or two of milk binds about a pound of meat; add milk only until the mixture holds when squeezed, since a wet mix will burst in the fat.
- Chop, do not grind"Chop it fine" means knife-cut or a few pulses in a food processor. A meat grinder or long processing turns cold roast beef pasty and the croquettes lose their texture.
- Two kinds of crumbThe coating calls for "fine pulverized" crumbs, meaning dried and sieved — modern dried breadcrumbs or panko crushed fine. The crumbs mixed into the interior were probably soft fresh ones, which absorb moisture, though the recipe does not say so.
- Season firmlyCold cooked beef is bland and the crumb dilutes it further. Salt and pepper more heavily than seems right, and taste a small pinch fried off before shaping the rest.
- SuetChopped beef suet was rendered in the pan to give a clean, high-smoking fat. Butter alone browns fast and can scorch; clarified butter, or butter with a neutral oil, behaves better at frying heat.
- FryingThe recipe says only that the fat should be hot, and the small quantity implies shallow frying rather than deep. Moderately hot fat — around 350F on a modern thermometer — turning the balls to colour all sides, is a workable reading. The meat is already cooked, so the aim is a set crust and a hot centre.
- Chill before fryingNot in the original, but half an hour in the refrigerator after shaping and crumbing firms the balls and keeps them from breaking apart in the pan.
- YieldA pound of leftover beef makes about twelve walnut-sized croquettes, serving three or four with a sauce or gravy.
Croquettes were one common way of using up cold meat for luncheon and supper. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the dish reached English and American kitchens through the nineteenth-century vogue for French cookery, though by 1900 it had thoroughly naturalised as an economy dish rather than a fashionable one. Household manuals of the period pressed the point hard: nothing from the roast was to be thrown away, and a competent housekeeper was judged partly on what she did with Monday's beef. The instruction to fry in "fine chopped suet" rather than butter is a mark of the same thrift.