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Meat Croquettes

A savory dish of meat-filled croquettes coated in breadcrumbs and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Meat Croquettes

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Meat Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.

  3. Add stock and milk, and bring to a boil until thickened.

  4. Mix in onion juice, lemon juice, lemon rind, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  5. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

  6. Stir in the beaten egg and chopped meat until well combined.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into cork-shaped croquettes.

  2. Coat each croquette in finely grated bread crumbs.

  3. Heat lard in a frying pan and fry the croquettes until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve on a napkin, garnished with parsley and lemon rind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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 base and adds richness to the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the stock and milk into a binding white sauce.
Egg
Binds the meat and sauce so the croquettes hold their shape.
Chopped meat
Forms the main filling, giving the croquettes body and savoury flavour.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden browned outer coating when fried.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before shaping. A warm, loose mixture is soft and sticky, so the croquettes can break or lose their shape. Cooling lets the starch-thickened base firm up enough to hold together through coating and frying.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, lemon, pepper, nutmeg, 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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