Skip to main content
Main

Meat Croquettes

A fried ball of beef mixture coated in breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Meat Croquettes

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Meat Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for one minute.

  3. Add the milk, nutmeg, and chopped beef, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and pulls away from the sides of the pan.

  4. Remove from heat and let it cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cooled, mold the mixture into egg-shaped balls.

  2. Dip each ball in beaten egg, then roll in bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the croquettes in boiling fat 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a stable binder that holds the filling together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the base and helps the flour cook into a roux.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the flour thickens into a smooth, creamy filling.
Chopped beef
Supplies the main filling, whose protein sets as it cooks and gives the croquette its body.
Egg
Beaten egg coating helps bread crumbs stick and forms a golden crust when fried.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before shaping. A hot, loose filling is too soft to hold its shape and can split or stick to the hands. Cooling lets the starch set so the balls keep their form in the hot fat.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, flour, egg, nutmeg, milk):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, flour, egg, nutmeg, milk. 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.

More meat croquettes recipes

Cold 9Australian 3 See all 60 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes