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Croquettes

A fried potato paste shaped into croquettes, coated in egg and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Croquettes

Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the potato paste with the yolk of one egg.

  2. Dust a board and your hands with flour.

  3. Take a piece of paste the size of an egg and roll it into a ball, then shape the ball like a cork.

Coat

  1. Beat the remaining egg white and whole egg together.

  2. Dip the shaped potato paste into the beaten egg, then roll the dipped paste in bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a stewpan half full of boiling fat until blue smoke rises.

  2. Fry the croquettes until golden brown, using a frying basket if available.

  3. Arrange the croquettes neatly in a hot vegetable dish.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Potato paste
Forms the soft interior that cooks through while the outside crisps.
Egg yolk
Binds the potato paste so the shaped croquettes hold together.
Egg white
Forms a sticky coat that helps the bread crumbs adhere.
White bread crumbs
Creates a crisp, golden-brown outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Heat the fat until blue smoke rises. Fat that is hot enough seals the crumb coating quickly, so the croquettes brown crisply instead of absorbing grease and turning soggy or falling apart.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, 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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