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Chicken Croquettes

A fried chicken croquette made with a butter‑parsley sauce, flour, milk, and egg yolks, coated in cracker dust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter with the chopped parsley in a porcelain pan over low heat for a few minutes.

  2. Add the flour and mix thoroughly.

  3. Stir in 2 egg yolks, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

  4. Gradually add the milk and chicken broth, stirring continuously until the mixture thickens.

Prepare the filling

  1. Finely chop the chicken or grind it using a meat grinder.

  2. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the chicken and mix it into the sauce. Let the mixture cool in the refrigerator.

  3. Once cooled, divide the mixture into croquettes.

Coat and fry

  1. Beat the remaining egg yolks and mix with cracker dust.

  2. Roll the croquettes in the egg and cracker mixture, then drop them into boiling lard to fry until golden.

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. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth base for the filling.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture into a sauce that holds the croquettes together.
Milk
Forms the body of the white sauce, giving it creaminess and softness.
Chicken broth
Adds savory flavor to the sauce and helps it thicken with the milk.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and bind the mixture, and the beaten yolks help the cracker dust coating stick.
Chicken
Provides the main filling, which the sauce binds into a shapeable mixture.

The step that matters

Chilling the mixture before shaping. The sauce must cool until firm so the croquettes keep their shape. Shaping a warm, soft mixture makes it slump and break apart in the hot lard.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, milk, egg, nutmeg, pepper. 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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