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Rice Croquettes

Rice croquettes are fried balls made from cooked rice, milk, sugar, eggs, butter, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Rice Croquettes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice base

  1. Soak the rice in warm water for 3 hours, then drain almost dry.

  2. Pour in the milk and cook in a double boiler until the rice is very tender.

  3. Add the sugar, butter, and salt, and simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Whisk the eggs until frothy, then cautiously mix them into the rice mixture off the heat.

  5. Return to the heat and stir until thickened, avoiding boiling.

  6. Remove from heat and stir in the grated lemon peel.

  7. Transfer to a greased dish to cool completely.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cool and stiff, flour your hands and shape into oval or pear-shaped balls.

  2. Dip each ball in beaten egg, then coat with fine cracker crumbs.

  3. Fry in hot lard until golden brown.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that swells in milk and gives the croquette mass its body.
Milk
Liquid that cooks the rice soft and creates a creamy, tender base.
Eggs
Set when heated, thickening the mixture so it holds its shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown when fried.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs off the heat. Eggs added to very hot rice can scramble into lumps. Mixing them in off the heat and then returning the pan to gentle heat, without boiling, lets them thicken the base smoothly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, sugar, egg, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, sugar, egg, 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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