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Veal Croquettes

A fried veal patty coated in breadcrumbs, made with veal, milk, flour, butter, eggs, onion, lemon juice, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Veal Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the veal base

  1. Mix butter and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in milk and heat until boiling.

  3. Add minced veal and cook for a few minutes.

  4. Stir in two eggs.

  5. Pour the mixture onto a platter to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cooled, form the mixture into cylindrical shapes.

  2. Dip each shape into beaten egg, then coat each shape with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Minced veal
Provides the main meat body and flavor of the croquettes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when heated, holding the shape together.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a sauce that gives the mixture body.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the flour-thickened base.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens with flour into a binding sauce.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before shaping. The mixture must cool and firm up before it is formed; if it is still warm and soft, the shapes will slump and may break apart when dipped and fried.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, milk, flour, butter, egg, pepper, lemon):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, milk, flour, butter, egg, pepper, lemon. 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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