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Rice Croquettes

Rice croquettes are small oval-shaped fried balls made from cooked rice, milk, sugar, eggs, butter, lemon peel, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rice Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Soak the rice in warm water for 1–2 hours.

  2. Drain the rice almost dry.

  3. Combine the rice with the milk.

  4. Steam until tender.

Make the mixture

  1. Stir in the sugar, melted butter, and salt.

  2. Beat the eggs until stiff.

  3. Fold the beaten eggs into the mixture.

  4. Cook for 5 minutes.

  5. Add the lemon peel.

  6. Transfer the mixture to a buttered dish to cool.

Shape, coat and fry

  1. Once cool, flour your hands.

  2. Shape the mixture into oval balls.

  3. Dip the balls in beaten eggs.

  4. Coat with cracker crumbs.

  5. Fry the croquettes in boiling lard until golden brown.

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

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Rice
Starch that softens into a thick base that holds the croquettes together.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, cooking with the rice into a creamy binding mixture.
Eggs
Beaten eggs add structure and help bind the mixture and form a coating for the crumbs.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown during frying.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the mixture.

The step that matters

Transfer the mixture to a buttered dish to cool. The mixture must cool enough to hold its shape when shaped by hand. Shaping it while still hot and soft makes the balls fragile and likely to break or fall apart during dipping and frying.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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