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Dessert

Croquettes of Fruit

Fruit croquettes made with stewed fruit, crumbled biscuits, sugar, lemon rind, cinnamon, egg, bread crumbs, and fried in fat.

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

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stone the fruit and place it in a jar with the sugar.

  2. Stew gently until tender, then strain off the juice.

Make the mixture

  1. Stir in the cake crumbs, lemon rind, and cinnamon.

  2. Add juice gradually until the right consistency is obtained.

  3. Spread the mixture on a dish to cool.

  4. Form into cork-shaped pieces.

Coat and fry

  1. Coat each piece with egg and bread crumbs.

  2. Fry in hot fat until nicely browned.

  3. 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, once stewed, the moist body of the filling.
Savoy biscuits or genoese cake
Absorb the fruit juice and bind the mixture so it holds its cork shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juice during stewing.
Egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumb coating sticks to each piece.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Add juice gradually until the right consistency is obtained. Too much juice makes the crumb mixture too wet to hold its shape and it may break apart in the fat, while too little leaves it dry and crumbly. Adding liquid in small amounts lets the cook stop at the point where the mixture is moist but firm enough to shape.

Swap the plum

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

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

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