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Potato Croquettes

A fried dish of mashed potatoes mixed with butter, salt, cayenne, parsley, egg, breaded and cooked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Potato Croquettes

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 ↓

Potato Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Heat the mashed potatoes and butter together until the butter melts.

  2. Add salt, cayenne pepper, chopped parsley, and the yolk of the egg.

  3. Spread the mixture in a shallow dish to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Form the cooled mixture into oblong shapes.

  2. Dip each shape in bread crumbs, then in beaten egg, and again in bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in hot butter 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Provide the bulk and starch that hold the croquette shape together.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the potatoes and browns the outside when frying.
Egg
Binds the mixture and, beaten, helps the bread crumbs adhere to the shapes.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before shaping. A warm, soft mixture is too loose to hold its shape and can crack or slump in the fat. Spreading it out to cool firms the potato starch so the shapes keep their form during frying.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, egg, bread. 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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