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Veal or Chicken Croquettes

A fried croquette made from minced veal or chicken mixed with onion, lemon, parsley, and a roux-based sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Veal or Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Combine minced veal or chicken, grated onion, lemon juice, chopped parsley, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Melt butter over medium heat in a saucepan. Stir in flour to make a roux.

  3. Gradually add milk, stirring until thickened.

  4. Mix the thickened sauce with the meat mixture and season with pepper, celery salt, and cayenne.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into croquettes.

  2. Refrigerate the croquettes until firm.

  3. 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked veal or chicken
Provides the main body and savory flavor of the croquettes.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a roux-based sauce that binds the filling.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving the filling a creamy, tender texture.
Butter
Cooks with the flour to form the roux and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Refrigerate the croquettes until firm. Chilling lets the starch-thickened sauce set so the croquettes hold their shape. If they are shaped warm or too soft, they can split or fall apart in the hot oil.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, parsley, butter, flour, pepper, celery. 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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