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Rice Croquettes

Rice croquettes are steamed rice mixed with sugar, salt, eggs, lemon, shaped, fried, and served with powdered sugar and jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Rice Croquettes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice base

  1. Steam 1 cup of rice in a double boiler until done, then drain.

  2. Add ½ teaspoon salt, ⅓ cup sugar, and 3 beaten eggs; steam for 3 more minutes.

  3. Stir in the juice and grated rind of 1 lemon and let cool completely.

Shape and fry

  1. Take 2 heaping tablespoons of the mixture for each croquette and shape into buns, making a dent in the center.

  2. Dip each croquette in raw egg, roll in cracker crumbs, and fry in hot lard until golden brown.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain on paper towels, sprinkle with powdered sugar, place a small lump of jelly in each dent, and serve hot.

  2. Optionally, cook 2 ounces of currants with the rice for the last 15 minutes and serve with a sweet fruit sauce.

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

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + curranttop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the croquette and sets into a soft, cohesive mass when cooked and cooled.
Eggs
Bind the rice mixture together and set during steaming, giving the croquettes structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the exterior brown when the croquettes are fried.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the mild, sweet rice mixture.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns during frying.

The step that matters

Let the rice mixture cool completely before shaping. A warm, moist mixture is soft and sticky and will not hold its shape. Cooling lets the starch and egg firm up so the buns keep their dent and survive dipping and frying.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sugar, egg, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar, egg, lemon. 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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