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Dessert

Croquettes of Rice

Rice croquettes are fried balls made from cooked rice, lemon rind, milk, sugar, bitter almonds, and apricot jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Croquettes of Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice mixture

  1. Boil the rice, lemon rind, milk, sugar, and bitter almonds together until well cooked.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then form it into balls.

Fill and coat

  1. Scoop out the center of each ball and fill it with apricot jam.

  2. Roll the filled balls in beaten egg, then dust with powdered biscuit.

Fry

  1. Fry the croquettes in hot lard until golden brown.

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. Almond + biscuittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Almond + apricottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

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

  4. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Rice + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooks into a thick base that holds the shape of each croquette.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to give the base a soft, creamy moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown during frying.
Egg
Coats the balls so the powdered biscuit sticks and forms a crisp layer.
Lard
Conducts heat in the hot frying fat, browning and crisping the outside.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before forming the balls. A hot, soft rice mixture is too sticky and loose to shape and hold a filling. Cooling lets the starch set so the balls keep their form when the center is scooped out and filled.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, sugar, almond, apricot, egg, biscuit):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, sugar, almond, apricot, egg, biscuit. 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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