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Almonds, Croquettes of

Almond croquettes are small almond balls coated in sugar and fried until golden.

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

Almonds, Croquettes of

Ingredients

Directions

Make the almond mixture

  1. Blanch and pound the sweet and bitter almonds with the sugar, egg white, and sherry or raisin wine.

  2. Crumble the sponge cake and add it to the mixture along with the frothed egg whites.

  3. Beat the mixture into a solid paste and mold it into balls the size of small oranges.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the balls first into egg, then into bread crumbs, and finally into sugar.

  2. Fry them in boiling butter or oil for about 6 minutes until golden brown. Drain and serve.

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. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Almond + sherrytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together517 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  5. Sherry + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the croquettes.
Egg whites
Frothed whites lighten the paste and help it set as it cooks.
Sponge cake
Adds soft crumb that gives the mixture a tender, moist texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and caramelises slightly on the crisp outside.
Bitter almonds
Add a sharper, more intense almond aroma to the paste.

The step that matters

Frying the coated balls. Oil or butter must be fully boiling when the balls go in. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy, and the centre may stay soft before the outside browns.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, sherry, bread, butter):

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Cocoafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, sherry, bread, 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.

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