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Sweetbread Croquettes

Sweetbread croquettes are fried balls of sweetbread, milk, flour, butter, and spices coated in crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Sweetbread Croquettes

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 ↓

Sweetbread Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a pot, bring 1 pint of rich milk to a boil.

  2. In a bowl, mix 4 tablespoons of flour with 4 tablespoons of melted butter until smooth.

  3. Slowly stir the flour mixture into the boiling milk and cook for a few minutes without browning.

  4. Add 1 cup of minced sweetbreads, a dash of cayenne pepper, and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to the mixture and mix well.

Shape and fry

  1. Set the mixture aside to cool, then shape it into croquettes.

  2. Roll the croquettes in cracker crumbs, then dip them in the beaten egg.

  3. Fry the croquettes in hot oil until they are light brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with tomato sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Cooked with butter and milk, it thickens the mixture into a binding base for the croquettes.
Butter
Melted into the flour to form a roux that adds richness and smooth texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a creamy, sliceable mixture.
Sweetbreads
Provide the main filling, giving the croquettes their substance and savory flavor.
Egg
Coats the croquettes so the cracker crumbs adhere and help form a crisp shell.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour mixture without browning. Cooking the flour and milk gently for a few minutes cooks out raw flour taste and thickens the base. Over-high heat can scorch the milk and brown the mixture, affecting flavor and color.

“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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