Skip to main content
Main

Veal, Beef or Chicken Croquettes

A fried croquette made with cold cooked meat, sweet milk, bread crumbs, and seasonings.

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

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 ↓

Veal, Beef or Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Heat sweet milk and bread crumbs in a saucepan, adding salt and pepper to taste as it boils and thickens. Remove from heat and let cool.

  2. In a bowl, combine cold cooked meat, beaten egg, parsley, butter, and onion juice. Mix thoroughly and add to the cooled milk mixture.

Shape and coat

  1. Mould the mixture into croquettes and let cool again.

  2. Dip each croquette in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in hot lard until golden brown and serve with cream 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.

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

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked meat
Forms the bulk of the croquette and gives it its main flavour.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk into a mixture firm enough to shape and absorb moisture.
Sweet milk
Moistens the crumbs and cooks into a thick binder that keeps the filling tender.
Raw egg
Binds the mixture together so it holds its shape while frying.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before shaping. The cooked milk and crumb mixture must be fully cool and firm so the croquettes hold their shape. Shaping a warm mixture makes it slack and sticky, and the croquettes can break apart in the hot lard.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, pepper, meat, egg, parsley, 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 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipes