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Sultana Croquettes

Sultana croquettes are fried balls of a buttery, flour-based mixture with raisins, nuts, and spices, served with a claret sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sultana Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the croquette mixture

  1. Make a sauce by melting the butter, then whisk in the flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the cream, stirring until thickened.

  3. Stir in the wine, brandy, soaked sultana raisins, chopped nuts, cinnamon, and salt.

  4. Cool the mixture, then shape it into croquettes.

Fry and make the claret sauce

  1. Fry the croquettes until golden brown.

  2. For the claret sauce, dilute the arrowroot in cold water, then add the claret and sugar.

  3. Cook the sauce for five minutes until thickened.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Wine + brandytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce base and adds richness and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a roux that structures the sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, thickening the base into a smooth mixture.
Arrowroot
Thickens the claret sauce into a glossy, smooth consistency.
Sugar
Sweetens the claret sauce and balances its tartness.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before shaping the croquettes. A warm, loose mixture is too soft to hold its shape and can slump or split when fried. Cooling lets the starch-thickened base firm up so the croquettes keep their form.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, wine, brandy, raisin, cinnamon):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, wine, brandy, raisin, cinnamon. 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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