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Veal Croquettes

Veal croquettes are boiled veal mixed with cream dressing, shaped into cylinders, coated in egg and breadcrumbs, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Veal Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Boil veal in enough boiling water to cover for 5 minutes.

  2. Transfer veal to the pot and cook for 3 hours.

  3. Chop the cooked veal finely and season with salt, pepper, celery salt, paprika, and lemon juice.

Shape and coat

  1. Mix in 1½ cups of thick cream dressing.

  2. Shape the mixture into cylinders.

  3. Once cool, roll each cylinder in egg and then in bread crumbs.

Fry

  1. 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the croquette and gives them their meaty flavour and texture.
Thick cream dressing
Adds moisture and richness so the chopped veal holds together when shaped.
Egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs adhere to the outside of each cylinder.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns during frying.
Hot lard
Conducts heat to brown and crisp the outside while cooking the croquette through.

The step that matters

Cool the shaped cylinders before coating. The mixture is soft when warm, so it can slump or break apart in the egg and crumbs. Cooling firms the fat and binder so the coating stays intact in the hot fat.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, lemon, cream, egg, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, lemon, cream, egg, bread. 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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