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Chicken, Veal or Fish Croquettes

A fried croquette made with chopped meat, stock, butter, flour, lemon, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Chicken, Veal or Fish Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix the chopped meat with pepper and salt.

  2. In a saucepan, combine stock (or cream and milk) with butter and heat until scalding.

  3. Whisk in flour to thicken, then remove from heat and let cool.

  4. Add the cooled mixture to the meat, along with lemon rind and juice, and mix well.

Shape and coat

  1. Chill the mixture until firm, then shape into cones.

  2. Roll each croquette in bread crumbs, then dip in a mixture of beaten egg and cream, and coat again in bread crumbs.

Fry

  1. Fry in boiling 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

Cooked meat
Forms the bulk of the croquette and provides the main flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and softens the filling.
Flour
Thickens the hot stock or cream into a sauce that binds the filling.
Stock
Supplies liquid that, thickened with flour, makes the filling moist and savoury.
Egg
Binds the egg wash so the bread crumbs adhere and form a crisp coating.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Chill the mixture until firm. A cooled, chilled filling holds its shape when formed and coated. If it is still soft, the croquettes can split or lose their shape in the hot lard.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, cream, butter, flour, bread, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, cream, butter, flour, bread, egg. 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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