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Macaroni Croquettes

A fried dish of boiled macaroni mixed with cheese, butter, flour, and milk, shaped into croquettes and coated in breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Macaroni Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil macaroni in salted water for 20 minutes.

  2. Cut macaroni into very small pieces.

  3. In a saucepan, melt butter and stir in flour to make a white sauce.

  4. Add milk to the sauce and cook until thickened.

  5. Stir in macaroni, cheese, and salt; let cool.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the mixture into croquettes.

  2. Dip each croquette in beaten egg.

  3. Coat each croquette with breadcrumbs.

Fry

  1. Fry in deep oil 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. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the filling, giving the croquettes body and a firm, chewy bite.
Butter and flour
Together form a roux that thickens the milk into a white sauce binding the filling.
Milk
Liquid that gelatinizes with the flour to make the sauce creamy and cohesive.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and helps the filling hold together as it cools.
Egg
Beaten egg coating sets when fried, helping breadcrumbs stick and forming a crisp shell.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crunchy, browned outer crust during frying.

The step that matters

Let the filling cool before shaping. A warm, loose sauce cannot hold its shape and may split or slump, so the mixture must firm up enough to be formed into croquettes.

“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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