Skip to main content
Main

Cheese Croquettes

Cheese croquettes are fried balls of cheese and cream sauce coated in breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cheese Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream sauce

  1. Make a cream sauce by melting butter in a saucepan, then whisk in corn starch and milk until smooth.

  2. Beat in the egg yolk and season with red pepper and salt.

Add the cheese

  1. Stir in the grated cheese until melted, then add the chopped cheese.

  2. Cool the mixture thoroughly, then shape it into croquettes and roll in bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the croquettes in hot oil until golden brown and serve hot on a bed of 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the milk and butter into a sauce that holds the croquette shape.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the sauce so it firms up when cooled.
Cheese
Provides the main flavour and, when melted, makes the filling creamy and stretchy.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the base of the cream sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, which the starch thickens.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture thoroughly. A warm filling is too soft to shape and will leak or break open in hot oil. Chilling firms the starch-thickened sauce so the croquettes hold together while frying.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, corn, milk, egg, pepper, cheese, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes