Skip to main content
Main

Fresh Fish Croquettes

A fried croquette made from finely minced fish mixed with seasonings, bound with milk or cream, shaped, breaded, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fresh Fish Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mince the fish finely and mix with salt, cayenne, and lemon juice.

  2. Heat Cottolene in a pan until bubbling.

  3. Add flour and stir until cooked but not brown.

  4. Add cream or milk and the fish mixture, stirring until smooth.

  5. If the mixture is too thick, add more milk.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into pear shapes using a wine glass as a mold.

  2. Moisten with egg yolk.

  3. Roll the shaped mixture in bread crumbs.

  4. Fry until golden brown.

  5. Serve with a dash of Tabasco sauce.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main body and flavour of the croquette filling.
Flour
Cooked briefly in fat to thicken the cream into a binding base.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and smooth texture to the mixture so it holds together.
Egg yolk
Moistens the shaped croquettes so the bread crumbs adhere and brown.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp golden coating that browns during frying.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour until cooked but not brown. Flour must be cooked in the hot fat to remove its raw taste and to thicken the mixture, but browning gives a darker colour and a different flavour. Stirring constantly over steady heat keeps it pale.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes