Name: Croquettes of Rice
Ingredients: 1 cup cooked rice; ½ cup bread crumbs; hot butter; jam (optional)

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Croquettes of Rice

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

1 cup cooked rice
½ cup bread crumbs
hot butter
jam (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Form the cooked rice into small balls.
Coat each ball with bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

Fry the croquettes in hot butter until lightly browned.
Drain on clean blotting paper.
Serve piled high on a dish, with jam in the center or on the side if desired.

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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Rice + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,259 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,645 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

Cooked rice: Forms the bulk of the croquette and holds its shape once shaped into balls.
Bread crumbs: Form a crisp, golden coating that browns during frying and protects the interior.
Butter: Conducts heat for frying and browns the crumb coating, adding richness and aroma.

“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.