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Veal or Beef Croquettes
To one pint cold chopped veal or beef, add one-half pint of cream; to this quantity, put one tablespoonful of butter creamed with one tablespoonful of flour. Put all except the meat over the fire to thicken; season to taste and pour over the meat; mix thoroughly and form into shape. Roll in bread crumbs after rolling in eggs and fry brown.
A standard use for the Sunday roast's remains: cooked meat bound in a thick cream sauce, chilled, shaped, breaded and fried. The recipe assumes you know the sauce must be stiff and the mixture cold before shaping, and says neither.
- The hinge: chill before shapingThe meat and sauce must go into the refrigerator until firm, at least two hours and preferably overnight. Croquettes shaped from warm mixture slump in the pan and burst in the fat.
- MeasuresA pint of chopped meat is 2 cups, roughly 12 oz of cooked veal or beef; half a pint of cream is 1 cup. That ratio gives a soft mixture, so the sauce needs to be genuinely thick.
- The sauce is a roux, not a slurryThe sauce needs to be much thicker -- One tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of cream is a thin sauce by modern standards. Note that the butter and flour are creamed together raw and stirred into the cream, rather than cooked together as a roux. Cook it down until it mounds on the spoon, or use two tablespoons of each; "put all except the meat over the fire to thicken" means simmer several minutes, not just heat through.
- Chop, do not grindThe recipe calls for chopped meat, done with a knife or in a chopping bowl, though mechanical food choppers were also in use by this period. A food processor pulsed a few times works; pureeing gives a pasty texture.
- BreadingCrumb, egg, crumb holds far better than the single pass described. Dip in fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again, and rest the shaped croquettes another 20 minutes before frying.
- Frying"Fry brown" gives no temperature, and the book specifies none. The modern equivalent is deep fat at about 375F for three to four minutes, until the crust colours. The filling is already cooked, so you are only crisping the outside; cooler fat soaks in and the crust splits.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here means at least salt and pepper; period croquette recipes often add nutmeg, onion juice or lemon. Season the sauce assertively, since cold meat and fried crumbs both mute it.
- YieldAbout eight croquettes of the usual cone or cork shape, serving four with a green vegetable.
Croquettes are a French technique -- the name comes from croquer, to crunch -- and by the late nineteenth century they were a standard American way of serving cold cooked meat a second time. They spread through the cooking schools and household compendia of the 1870s and 1880s. A thick cream sauce binds chopped leftovers into something that can be shaped, breaded and fried, and a deep kettle of fat was well within the reach of a coal-range kitchen. Veal is mild and pale and takes seasoning well; beef was the more likely thing left on the platter.