Skip to main content
Main

Egg Croquettes

Egg croquettes are small cylinders of egg mixture fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Egg Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Combine the chopped eggs with milk, butter, flour, parsley, onion juice, salt, and pepper in a saucepan.

  3. Cook the mixture over low heat until thickened.

  4. Let the mixture cool in the refrigerator.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the cooled mixture into cylinders.

  2. Roll each cylinder in beaten egg.

  3. Roll each cylinder in cracker crumbs.

Fry

  1. Fry the croquettes 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Form the bulk of the filling and give the croquettes their body.
Milk
Moistens the filling and helps it thicken into a soft, spreadable mixture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a binding sauce that holds the filling together.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the thickened filling.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool in the refrigerator. The filling must be fully chilled and firm before shaping, or the cylinders will be soft and may break or leak during coating and frying.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, butter, flour, parsley, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, butter, flour, parsley, pepper. 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.

More egg croquettes recipes

You might also like