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Chicken Croquettes

A fried chicken croquette made with boiled chicken, milk, flour, butter, and spices, coated in crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 base

  1. Boil the sweet milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold milk to make a thin paste.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling milk and cook until thickened.

  4. Add the butter, salt, and cayenne pepper, then mix well with the chopped chicken.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the mixture into croquettes.

  2. Dip each croquette first in the beaten egg, then coat with the rolled crackers.

Fry

  1. Fry in hot tallow or a mixture of tallow and 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 paste that holds the croquettes together.
Egg
Binds the coating so the cracker crumbs stick to the croquette.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the chicken mixture.
Sweet milk
Forms the creamy base that is thickened to bind the chicken.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the milk. Stir the flour paste into the boiling milk and cook until thickened. Raw flour tastes pasty, and a thin or lumpy base will not hold the croquettes' shape. Cooking it fully thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, binding texture.

“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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