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Fish Croquettes

Fish croquettes made from mashed cold fish, butter, spices, egg, and breadcrumbs, fried in lard and served with tartare sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Fish Croquettes

Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 ↓

Fish Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove all skin and bones from the cold fish and mash it until smooth.

  2. Add butter, pepper, coarse sea salt, ground mace, and optional crab or lobster sauce.

  3. Form the mixture into egg-sized portions.

  4. Add bread crumbs if the mixture is too soft.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each portion into a beaten egg, then coat with fine bread crumbs.

  2. Fry in boiling lard until golden brown, then drain.

Serve

  1. Serve on a napkin garnished with fried parsley or with tartare 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold fish
Forms the main body of the croquettes, providing the flavour and bulk of the filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the mashed filling tender and moist.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture to firm a soft mixture and form a crisp golden coating when fried.
Egg
Binds the coating so the crumbs stick, and helps it set and brown in the hot lard.

The step that matters

Fry in boiling lard until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly; if it is too cool, the croquettes absorb grease, turn soggy and may fall apart before the coating sets.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, butter, pepper, crab, bread, egg, parsley):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, butter, pepper, crab, bread, egg, parsley. 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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