Croquetas De Carne Y Jamón

This croquetas recipe comes from Carmen Volante’s 6th notebook, written in 1904—a time of lively culinary exchange and the modernization of Spanish home cooking. Croquetas were already household favorites, blending French bechamel sauce technique with local tastes, and providing a thrifty means to repurpose leftover meats. Cookbooks like Volante’s were handwritten family treasures, filled with both traditional Spanish and cosmopolitan European recipes. At the turn of the 20th century, recipes often favored pork lard ('manteca') over butter and measured ingredients in handfuls, spoonfuls, or visual cues, making each cook's interpretation slightly different.

Back in the early 1900s, these croquetas would have been prepared in a rustic kitchen with a wood- or coal-fired stove. Cooks used deep, heavy-bottomed saucepans and cast iron skillets for frying. Knives were honed for fine chopping, and a wooden spoon or spatula would stir the roux and meat mixture together. Sifting bread crumbs might involve a coarse hand-held sieve, and frying was typically done in a generous amount of pork lard in an enamel or copper pot. There were no refrigerators, so chilling the mixture would mean placing it in the coolest part of the house.