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Egg Croquettes

Egg croquettes made with poached eggs, flour, stock, bread crumbs, cheese, and fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Egg Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Poach the eggs and dry them on a towel.

Make the coating mixture

  1. Cook the butter with the onion for three minutes.

  2. Add the flour and gradually stir in the stock.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then add the slightly beaten egg yolks.

  4. Cook for one minute and let cool.

Coat and fry

  1. Cover the poached eggs with the mixture.

  2. Roll the covered eggs in equal parts of bread crumbs and cheese.

  3. Dip the rolled eggs in beaten egg.

  4. Roll again in crumbs.

  5. Fry in deep fat.

  6. Drain on brown paper.

Serve

  1. Serve with a thin white sauce seasoned with grated cheese, salt, and paprika.

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

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

  2. Bread + cheesetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Poached eggs form the firm centre that the coating wraps around.
Butter
Fat that enriches the flavour and helps form the smooth base mixture.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a binding sauce that holds the coating together.
Egg yolks
Enrich and bind the mixture, helping it set when cooled.
Stale bread crumbs
Form a crisp outer crust that browns during frying.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and helps the crumb coating brown.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture for one minute and let it cool before coating. The flour must be cooked enough to thicken the base and lose its raw taste, and the mixture must cool and firm so it can be shaped around the eggs without sliding off or melting into the coating during frying.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

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