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Chicken Croquettes

A savory dish of finely chopped chicken mixed with sweetbreads, cream, spices, and egg, formed into rolls, coated, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Chicken Croquettes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads and chickens.

  2. Chop the parboiled sweetbreads and chickens very finely.

Make the custard

  1. Mix melted butter with flour, spices, and seasoning until smooth.

  2. Add cream to the mixture.

  3. Place the mixture in a tin in a pot of boiling water.

  4. Stir the mixture until it thickens.

  5. Cool the mixture.

Shape and fry

  1. Add the chopped chicken, onion, and well-beaten egg yolks to the cooled mixture.

  2. Form the mixture into long rolls.

  3. Coat the rolls with fine cracker crumbs and egg.

  4. Fry the rolls in boiling 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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main body of the filling, which is chopped finely to bind into a soft mass.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that holds the filling together.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, forming the base of the thickened custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich and bind the filling, helping it set firm when cooled and fried.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture until it thickens. Flour must be cooked in the hot butter-cream sauce until thick, or it tastes raw and the filling stays too loose to shape into rolls.

Swap the onion

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

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

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