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Rice Croquettes

Rice croquettes are fried rice cakes coated in egg and cracker.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Rice Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Beat the eggs and sugar together.

  2. Work the melted butter into the cold rice.

  3. Stir all ingredients together and season with salt and lemon peel.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the mixture into croquettes.

  2. Roll each croquette in the raw egg and then in the pounded cracker.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry a few croquettes at a time in hot sweet lard until golden.

  2. Drain on soft white paper and serve hot.

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. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour 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

Cold boiled rice
Forms the bulk of the croquette, giving body to the shaped mixture.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when heated, holding the croquettes together.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture, softening the rice and carrying flavour.
Raw egg
Acts as a sticky binder so the cracker coating adheres before frying.
Pounded cracker
Forms a crisp, golden browned crust when fried.

The step that matters

Fry a few croquettes at a time in hot sweet lard until golden.. Crowding the pan drops the fat temperature, so the coating soaks up grease instead of crisping quickly. Frying in small batches in hot fat keeps the crust crisp and the centre heated through.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, egg, flour, sugar. 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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