Name: Chicken Croquettes
Ingredients: 1 old chicken; ½ cup coarse sea salt; 1 onion, sliced; 8 peppercorns; 2-3 roots of celery or celery seed; small amount of thyme (optional); 1 bay leaf (optional); cream sauce

Why it works: Celery and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,193 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the chicken well and plunge it into a kettle of boiling salted water.
Cook on low heat, adding onion, peppercorns, celery, thyme, and bay leaf.
Let the chicken cook until tender.
Remove the chicken from the liquid and let it cool.
Chop the chicken finely and mix it with cream sauce.
Strain the cooking liquid, remove the fat when cold, and use it for sauces.

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.

Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,193 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,171 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,518 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,814 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the thyme

The recipe marks thyme as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, celery, cream, sauce):

Garlicfits better
Tarragonfits better
Capersfits about as well
Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, celery, cream, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.