Skip to main content
Main

Sauce for Tongue Croquettes

A sauce made from tongue cooking water, spices, vinegar, flour, butter, and crushed rusk, used for tongue croquettes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Sauce for Tongue Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine water from cooking the tongue, spices, and vinegar in a saucepan.

  2. Mix flour and butter together, then stir into the saucepan until thickened.

  3. Stir in crushed rusk and mix well with chopped tongue.

  4. Spread mixture on a shallow plate to cool.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape mixture into balls and let stand for 30 minutes in a cool place.

  2. Shape mixture into rolls.

  3. Roll each croquette in fine crushed rusk.

  4. Roll each croquette in a beaten egg mixed with 2 tablespoons cold water.

  5. Roll each croquette again in the rusk.

Fry

  1. Heat 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon lard in a frying pan until hot.

  2. Fry the rolls, turning quickly until browned.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce and helps bind the mixture into a firm base.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and helps the rolls brown when fried.
Crushed double baked rusk
Absorbs moisture and gives the mixture body and a crisp outer coating.
Eggs (in the method)
Forms a binding layer that helps the rusk coating adhere before frying.

The step that matters

Shape and coat before frying. The mixture must be cooled and firm enough to shape, and the egg and rusk coating must be applied evenly so the croquettes hold together and brown without breaking open in the pan.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, pepper, cider, vinegar, flour, butter):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, cider, vinegar, flour, 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

Ham in CiderHam in Cider10 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes