Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Croquettes

Ground chicken mixed with a sauce of butter, flour, milk, egg, salt, pepper, onion juice, and nutmeg, then coated in breadcrumbs and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan until it foams.

  2. Add the flour, salt, white pepper, onion juice, and nutmeg, and blend in the hot milk gradually.

  3. Cook the mixture for 10 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg.

Shape and coat

  1. Once cooled, mix the sauce with the ground chicken.

  2. Form the mixture into cylindrical shapes, using about 1 tablespoon for each.

  3. Roll each croquette in breadcrumbs, then dip in the egg, and roll in breadcrumbs again.

Fry

  1. Fry the croquettes in hot oil 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 chicken
Forms the main body and bulk of the croquette filling.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce that binds the chicken together.
Milk or cream
Provides moisture and a smooth, creamy base for the sauce.
Egg
Adds binding and helps the coating set during frying.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and starts the flour-based sauce.

The step that matters

Chilling the mixture before shaping. The chicken and sauce must be cool and firm enough to hold their shape. If shaped while warm, the mixture is soft and can split or fall apart in the hot oil.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, milk, egg, onion, nutmeg. 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 chicken croquettes recipes

Mock 6Italian 4 See all 418 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes