Thick bechamel, cold overnight, breadcrumbed and fried – and it was invented to use up yesterday’s dinner
Bar Kroketa holds a 4.6 from six hundred and seventy-five people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and it does one thing.
Short menu. Do one thing. Five hundred and eighty-eight articles and it has never failed.
What a croqueta actually is
It is a very thick bechamel.
That is the whole secret and it disappoints everybody who hears it.
You make a roux, and you make a white sauce, and you keep cooking it and keep cooking it until it is thick enough to hold its shape when it cools – and then you fold in whatever you have.
Ham. Chicken. Cod. Mushroom. The scrapings of a stew.
And then you refrigerate it, overnight, until it sets solid. And then you cut it, and shape it, and coat it in egg and breadcrumb, and fry it hard.
And the inside, when it hits the heat, goes back to being liquid.
The engineering
Which is the reason it is difficult.
A croqueta must be solid enough to handle, crumb and fry – and it must be molten in the middle by the time it reaches the table.
Those are contradictory requirements and the gap between them is very narrow. Too thin and it bursts in the fryer. Too thick and it is a paste.
Every Spanish grandmother has an opinion. Every Spanish restaurant is judged on it. And a bad croqueta – stiff, floury, cold in the centre – is one of the most disappointing objects in food.
It was a leftover dish
And this is the part that matters.
The croqueta exists to use up what is left. The ham bone. The end of the chicken. The bits of the stew that are not enough for a meal.
It is thrift, and it is Spanish domestic thrift specifically, and it comes from households where throwing food away was not an option.
We have found this in every postcode. Nose to tail, at St. JOHN, which changed British cooking by pointing out that if you kill an animal it is only polite to eat all of it. Smoking, which was a way to survive February. Salt cod, which fed Catholic Europe every Friday for centuries.
The great dishes of the world are, overwhelmingly, solutions to the problem of not having enough – and they are now sold, at forty pounds a head, to people who have never been hungry.
The bar
A 4.6 across six hundred and seventy-five people is a strong number on a real sample.
Verdict
Excellent. Order the jamon croquetas. Order six. They are small and you will want more and everybody does.
Bechamel is French and nobody minds
Which is worth a line, because the Spanish are not usually relaxed about this sort of thing.
The croqueta is Spanish and the sauce inside it is one of the French mother sauces, named after a steward of Louis XIV, and it arrived in Spain with French cooks in the eighteenth century.
And Spain took it, and did something with it that France never did, and now the croqueta is more Spanish than almost anything else on the table.
Nobody in Spain thinks of it as French. Nobody in France claims it.
It is one of the very few culinary borrowings in Europe that has produced no argument whatsoever, and after five postcodes of watching countries fight over food, we find that quietly remarkable.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
