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Lobster Croquets

A fried dish of lobster mixture shaped into sausage-like croquettes, served with parsley and fried chip potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Lobster Croquets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mash the contents of a tin of lobster with a fork.

  2. Add bread crumbs, lemon rind, parsley, thyme, nutmeg, salt, and Nepal pepper.

  3. Bind the mixture with beaten eggs and flour if needed.

  4. Shape the mixture into short, thick sausages.

Coat and fry

  1. Coat the sausages with egg and bread crumbs.

  2. Fry in hot oil until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with crisped parsley and fried chip potatoes.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Forms the main body and flavour of the croquettes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help the coating set during frying.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the mixture body and a crisp outer coating.
Flour
Helps bind the mixture when it is too soft to hold its shape.

The step that matters

Shaping and binding the mixture. If the mixture is too wet, the croquettes will slump and crack in the oil. Binding with egg and adding flour only as needed gives a firm shape that holds during frying.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, bread, lemon, parsley, thyme, pepper, egg. 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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