It is claimed that the croquette originated in France and that in 1898 Monsieur Auguste Escoffier, the founder of the classical French Cuisine, together with the help of a certain Monsieur Philias Gilbert started to write down the recipe. With that, the classical formulation and procedures were in place.

Now, as you and I may well suspect, the fact that Auguste (Escoffier) wrote it down does not necessary mean that he actually invented the croquette at all! It could well have been a farmer’s daughter, who wanted to re-use the previous day’s left-overs, by deciding to form a cylinder or ball out of the left over stew, rolling it through egg and breading it, and then accidently dropped in a pan of hot oil.

What we do know, is that Auguste Escoffiers’ chefs started to travel around, and in doing so, spread the recipe around the world. Every country then adjusted the original recipe with ingredients from their own culture. And so the original croquette took on all kinds of different shapes and flavours such as salmon croquettes, shrimp, chicken, jambon, vegetarian croquettes just to name a few.