Home-style ── Yoshoku (Japanese Western-style dishes)
Kani Kuriimu Korokke
Crab cream croquette — crabmeat in white sauce, breaded and fried
Crabmeat folded into white sauce, breaded and deep-fried. Traced to the cream croquette that reached Japan in 1887, a line that is said to have split from the potato croquette into a separate menu item around 1895.
- Fried
Lineage
What it's made of
Break the breadcrumb crust open and crabmeat spills out of a runny white sauce. Where a potato croquette is crisp outside and soft and starchy within, this one is creamy all the way through the crust, and biting in sends out a rush of hot sauce. The crab's flavor is said to ride on the butter-scented sauce as it spreads, hot enough that it's worth letting it cool a moment first.
How it's made
The usual method is to fold crabmeat into a white sauce made with milk and butter, chill it until firm, shape it into ovals, coat it in breadcrumbs, and deep-fry it briefly at high heat. Because the sauce is so soft, it can burst if the coating isn't tight, so cooks need a quick hand to seal and fry it before that happens, and chilling the shaped ovals thoroughly beforehand is said to matter just as much.
Why it took this shape
One account traces it back to 1887, when croquette — cream croquette — first reached Japan; because dairy processing wasn't yet common, a separate potato-based croquette is said to have spread instead. By around 1895 the two had become distinct menu items, and crab is counted among the fillings that carry on the cream-based line, one still kept on the menu at yoshoku restaurants today.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Food for Obon and the harvest moon (tsukimi)A guide to the meat-free shojin ryori and somen served at Obon, and the tsukimi dango offered on the night of the harvest moon.
- At teishoku diners, shokudo, and machi-chukaA guide to the teishoku set-meal format, free rice refills, table placement, and paying at a shokudo-style diner.
Dishes in the same style
- Ebi FuraiBreaded, deep-fried shrimp. The leading theory traces it to applying the cutlet's breading method to shrimp, with its spread as a Nagoya specialty said to date only from after the war.
- Mirufiyu KatsuA tonkatsu variant made by layering thin pork slices before breading and frying. Said to have spread as a way to achieve both visual thickness and a light bite while using less meat than a single thick slab.