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Chicken Croquettes

Chicken croquettes made from boiled chicken and sweetbreads, mixed with milk, butter, flour, parsley, and spices, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the chicken and sweetbreads until tender, then let cool.

  2. Remove the skin and chop the chicken and sweetbreads very finely.

Make the filling

  1. Fry the onion slices in a little butter until brown.

  2. Pour a portion of the milk over the onions to extract the juice, then strain into the meat.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the remaining milk and butter and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the chopped meat, flour, parsley, salt, and pepper, stirring until thickened.

  5. Set aside to cool, then mold into shapes.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each shape into egg and coat with cracker crumbs.

  2. Drop into boiling lard and fry until golden.

  3. Garnish with a sprig of parsley and serve with or without sauce.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the bulk of the croquette and gives them their main savoury flavour.
Sweetbreads
Adds a rich, tender texture to the filling once finely chopped.
Milk
Moistens the meat and, with the flour, helps form a thickened binding.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the filling holds its shape when cooled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the onion and milk mixture.
Egg
Binds the crumb coating to the shaped croquettes so they hold together in the fat.

The step that matters

Let the filling cool before shaping. A warm, loose filling will not hold its shape and can break apart when coated and dropped into hot lard. Cooling lets the flour-thickened mixture set firmly enough to mould.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, milk, butter, flour, parsley, 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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