Skip to main content
Main

Croquets of Cold Meat

Croquettes of Cold Meat are fried balls of shredded meat mixed with sauce, spices, and bread, coated in egg and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Croquets of Cold Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Shred any kind of boiled or roasted meat, ensuring it is free of bones.

  2. Mix the meat with a thick piquante sauce; if too thin, add a little bread.

  3. Incorporate capers, mushrooms, coarse sea salt, spices, and fine herbs, and boil together.

  4. Let the mixture cool on a chopping board or dish.

Shape and fry

  1. Form the mixture into balls and flatten them.

  2. Roll each ball in egg and then in grated bread.

  3. Fry in butter until browned on both sides.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + caperstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled or roasted meat
Forms the bulk of the filling and gives the croquettes their main flavour.
Piquante sauce
Binds the shredded meat together and adds moisture and tang.
Bread
Thickens the mixture when the sauce is too thin, helping it hold its shape.
Egg
Coats the shaped balls so the grated bread crumbs adhere and set when fried.
Butter
Fries the coating to a golden brown and adds rich flavour.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before shaping. Letting the filling cool and firm up lets the balls hold their shape. Shaping a warm, loose mixture can cause it to fall apart in the pan.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, sauce, bread, mushroom, egg, butter):

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, sauce, bread, mushroom, egg, butter. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes