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Dessert

Croquettes De Elan

Croquettes de Elan are fried pieces of flan coated in flour and dusted with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Croquettes De Elan

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the flan into walnut-sized pieces.

  2. Roll the pieces in flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the floured pieces in butter until golden.

  2. Drain the croquettes on paper towels.

  3. Sift sugar over them and serve in a napkin.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Flan
Provides the soft custard filling that the croquettes are built around.
Flour
Forms a thin dry coating that helps the outside brown and crisp when fried.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the golden crust.

The step that matters

Frying the floured pieces in butter. Butter browns quickly and can burn before the coating is golden, so the heat needs to stay moderate. The flour coating must be intact and evenly covered, or the flan may leak and stick to the pan.

“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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