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Veal Croquettes

Veal croquettes are small, fried meat cakes made from boiled veal mixed with milk, corn starch, butter, nutmeg, and salt, coated in cracker meal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Veal Croquettes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Boil the veal until cooked, then let it cool.

  2. Chop or grind the veal very finely.

Make the filling

  1. In a pot, stir corn starch into boiling milk, then add butter, grated nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Mix in the chopped veal and spread on a platter to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cooled, mold into desired shapes, roll in cracker meal, and fry in hot lard or butter until browned.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main protein body of the croquette filling.
Milk
Forms a thickened, creamy binder with the corn starch to hold the veal together.
Corn starch
Thickens the boiling milk so the mixture sets firm enough to shape.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the filling and helps browning when frying.
Cracker meal
Forms a crisp, golden outer coating during frying.

The step that matters

Chopping or grinding the veal very finely. Fine pieces blend evenly into the thickened milk and bind into a smooth, shapeable mass; coarse pieces can make the croquettes crumble and fall apart when fried.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, milk, corn, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Sagefits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, milk, corn, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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