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Chicken Croquets

Chicken croquettes are fried, breaded balls made from boiled chicken, butter, flour, cream, lemon, seasonings, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Croquets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Stir in the flour until well combined.

  3. Add the cream or stock and mix well.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the mixture into oyster-like forms.

  2. Dip each shape in beaten egg yolks, then coat with cracker crumbs.

Fry

  1. Fry in hot butter 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Chicken
Provides the main body and flavour of the croquettes.
Butter
Enriches the base and adds fat for browning the coating during frying.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream or stock into a mixture that holds its shape.
Cream or stock
Adds moisture so the flour-butter base becomes a soft, shapeable mixture.
Egg yolks
Bind the coating so the cracker crumbs stick to the shapes.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer coating when fried.

The step that matters

Frying in hot butter until golden brown. If the butter is not hot enough, the coated shapes absorb grease and turn soggy instead of crisping. Too much heat can brown the crumbs before the centre warms through.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, flour, cream, pepper, egg):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, cream, pepper, 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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