Skip to main content
Main

Carrot Croquettes

Carrot croquettes are fried carrot cakes coated in breadcrumbs, served with fried parsley.

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

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Carrot Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Scrape and boil the carrots until half cooked, then drain and grate them.

Shape the croquettes

  1. Mix in enough thick cream sauce to bind the puree, along with 1 egg per cup of carrot mixture, sugar, and coarse sea salt to taste.

  2. Chill the mixture until firm, then form into croquettes.

  3. Dip each croquette in egg, then coat with fine breadcrumbs, repeating if necessary.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in deep boiling lard until golden brown.

  2. Serve with a bunch of fried parsley.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fine young carrots
Provide the main bulk and sweet flavor of the croquette filling.
Thick cream sauce
Binds the grated carrot puree so it holds its shape when formed.
Egg
Binds the mixture and forms a coating that helps breadcrumbs stick.
Fine breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust during frying.

The step that matters

Chill the mixture until firm. A soft mixture will not hold its shape when formed and can fall apart in the hot lard. Chilling firms the binder so the croquettes keep their form while frying.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sauce, egg, sugar, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sauce, egg, sugar, parsley. 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

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes