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Carrot Croquettes

Carrot croquettes are fried carrot cakes coated in breadcrumbs, served with fried parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Carrot Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Scrape and boil the carrots until half cooked, then drain and grate them.

  2. Add enough thick cream sauce to bind the mixture, along with 1 egg per cup of grated carrots, sugar, and salt to taste.

  3. Set the mixture aside until firm, then form into croquettes.

Bread and fry

  1. Dip each croquette in egg, then in fine breadcrumbs, repeating if necessary.

  2. Fry the croquettes in deep boiling lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with a bunch of fried parsley.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Fine young carrots
Provide the bulk and sweet flavour of the croquette filling.
Thick cream sauce
Binds the grated carrot so the mixture holds its shape when formed.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps the breadcrumb coating adhere.
Fine breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden browned crust when fried.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture set before forming. Grated carrot with sauce and egg is soft and wet. Chilling or resting it until firm lets the starch and egg set, so croquettes keep their shape instead of slumping or splitting in the hot lard.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sauce, egg, sugar, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sauce, egg, sugar, parsley. 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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