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Cheese Croquettes

Cheese croquettes are fried balls of cheese, egg, and sauce coated in breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parmesan cheese and cheese match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,041 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Cheese Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix the Parmesan cheese, American cheese, and slightly beaten egg in a bowl.

  2. Season with paprika and salt, then mix in the heavy white sauce.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then shape it into croquettes.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each croquette in bread crumbs, then in egg, and again in bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the croquettes in hot oil 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. Parmesan cheese + cheesetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,041 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Parmesan cheese + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together577 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Parmesan cheese + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, concentrated cheese flavor and helps the mixture hold together.
American cheese
Melts smoothly into the sauce, giving the filling a creamy, binding texture.
Egg
Binds the mixture and, with bread crumbs, helps the coating stick during frying.
Heavy white sauce
Provides moisture and body, so the cheese mixture can be shaped once cooled.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before shaping. A warm, loose mixture is too soft to hold its shape. Cooling lets the starch in the white sauce and the cheese firm up, so the croquettes keep their form and do not split or spread when fried.

“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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