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Mock Chicken Croquettes

A fried croquette made with rye bread, walnuts, butter, onion, mace, milk, eggs, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Mock Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix chopped rye bread and chopped walnuts.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon butter, grated onion, and ground mace, and mix again.

  3. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a saucepan. Add ½ tablespoon flour.

  4. Gradually stir in 1 cup rich milk and bring to a boil.

  5. Add the bread mixture to the saucepan. Season with salt and pepper.

  6. Stir in beaten eggs. Remove from heat.

  7. Add 1 tablespoon lemon juice and mix well.

  8. Let cool on a platter.

Shape and fry

  1. Form the mixture into cylinders.

  2. Dip in beaten egg. Coat with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the croquettes in boiling fat 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Rye + walnuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Rye bread
Provides the bulk of the filling and absorbs the milk to give body.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, nutty texture to the soft filling.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the filling and helps build the milk sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce that binds the filling together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture as they set, holding the croquettes together when shaped.

The step that matters

Let cool on a platter before shaping. A warm, loose filling is too soft to hold its cylinder shape. Cooling lets the starch and egg set so the croquettes keep their form through dipping and frying.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rye, bread, walnut, butter, onion, flour, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rye, bread, walnut, butter, onion, flour, milk. 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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