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Dessert

Croquettes of Fruit

Fruit croquettes made with stewed cherries, damsons or plums, crumbled Savoy biscuits, sugar, lemon rind, cinnamon, egg, breadcrumbs, fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Croquettes of Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Stone the fruit and place it in a jar with the sugar. Stew gently until tender.

  2. Strain off the juice and stir in the cake crumbs, lemon rind, and cinnamon.

  3. Add juice gradually until the right consistency is obtained, then spread on a dish to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Form into cork-shaped pieces, coat carefully with egg and breadcrumbs.

  2. Fry in hot fat until nicely browned. Serve garnished with strips of angelica.

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. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Biscuit + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Cooking cherries, damsons, or plums
Provide the main fruit flavour and tartness, and soft moisture that softens the crumb mixture.
Savoy biscuits or genoese cake
Absorb the fruit juice and give the mixture body so it can be shaped.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and balances its tartness.
Egg
Binds the coating so the breadcrumbs stick and help the outside brown when fried.

The step that matters

Adding the juice gradually. Cake crumbs soak up liquid at different rates. Adding juice a little at a time lets you stop once the mixture holds together. Too much juice makes it soggy and unable to hold a shape, while too little leaves it crumbly and dry.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, sugar, lemon, cinnamon, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, sugar, lemon, cinnamon, 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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