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Chicken Croquettes

Chicken croquettes made with boiled chicken, milk, flour, butter, and spices, coated in crackers and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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

Make the white sauce

  1. Boil the sweet milk until hot.

  2. In a small amount of cold milk, thin the flour and stir it into the boiling milk.

  3. Cook the flour mixture until well combined, then add the butter, salt, and cayenne pepper.

Shape and coat

  1. Mix the cooked mixture into the chopped chicken thoroughly.

  2. Form the mixture into small balls with your hands.

  3. Dip each ball first into the beaten egg, then coat with the rolled fine crackers.

Fry

  1. Fry the croquettes in hot tallow or a mixture of half tallow and half lard 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce that binds the chicken together.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the mixture a smoother texture.
Egg
Binds the coating so the crackers stick to each croquette.
Crackers
Form a crisp, browned outer crust when fried.
Boiled chicken
Provides the main body and flavor of the croquettes.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour mixture until well combined. Flour added to hot milk can clump if not thinned first and stirred well. Cooking it fully lets the starch swell and thicken, so the mixture holds together when shaped and fried.

“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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