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Sauce for Croquette Mixtures

A sauce made with butter, flour, stock or milk, and seasonings to thicken croquette mixtures.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Sauce for Croquette Mixtures

thickens two cups of meat
Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and seasonings, then gradually stir in the stock or milk.

  3. Cook until the mixture thickens.

Use the sauce

  1. This sauce is enough to thicken two cups of meat for croquettes.

  2. Optionally, add two egg yolks or one whole egg for variation.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 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

Butter
Fat that cooks with the flour and carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Starch that swells in hot liquid and thickens the sauce to a smooth body.
Stock or milk
Liquid that hydrates the flour and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the liquid gradually. Flour starch clumps when it meets liquid all at once. Adding the stock or milk slowly while stirring lets each granule hydrate evenly, so the sauce thickens smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, flour, celery, milk, lemon):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, flour, celery, milk, lemon. 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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