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Chicken Croquettes

A fried dish of finely chopped chicken mixed with spices, cream, butter, onions, and parsley, coated in cracker dust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the hen or pullet until cooked, then let it cool.

  2. Remove all the skin and chop the meat very fine.

Shape the croquettes

  1. In a bowl, mix the chopped chicken with pepper, salt, nutmeg, lemon juice, cream, butter, fried onions, and parsley.

  2. Pack the mixture into a glass and turn it out.

  3. Dip each croquette in egg yolk, then coat with cracker dust.

Fry

  1. Fry in hot oil until light 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Hen or pullet
Supplies the cooked meat that forms the body of the croquettes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the filling moist and tender.
Cream
Adds moisture and softness to the chopped chicken filling.
Egg yolk
Binds the coating so the cracker dust adheres to each croquette.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and aroma from frying the onions.

The step that matters

Chop the chicken very fine. Fine chopping gives the filling a smooth, cohesive texture so the croquettes hold their shape and fry evenly instead of crumbling.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, nutmeg, lemon, cream, butter, parsley, egg):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, nutmeg, lemon, cream, butter, parsley, egg. 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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