Skip to main content
Main

Veal Croquettes

Veal croquettes are small, breaded pieces of veal mixed with stock, lemon, parsley, and nutmeg, fried until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Veal Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the veal mixture

  1. Chop the veal finely and boil the bones and trimmings to make stock.

  2. Melt the butter or dripping in a saucepan, add the flour, and pour in the stock. Stir until it boils, then boil the sauce for a few minutes.

  3. Add the veal, parsley, lemon rind, nutmeg, salt, and pepper, and stir well over heat.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cool, form the mixture into cork-shaped pieces.

  2. Brush with beaten egg, coat with bread crumbs, and fry in hot fat until browned.

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

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main body of the croquettes, set firm by the thick sauce around it.
Flour
Thickens the stock with the melted butter into a sauce that holds the veal together.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat for flavour and helps the flour cook into a smooth base for the sauce.
Egg
Brushed on the shaped pieces so the bread crumbs stick and form a crust.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns when fried.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before shaping. A warm, loose mixture cannot hold its cork shape and may split or slump in the hot fat. Cooling lets the sauce set so the pieces keep their form and the coating stays intact while frying.

“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 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes