Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Croquettes

Small, round, flat cakes of chicken, flour, and breadcrumbs fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicken Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, combine flour and water; let it boil until thick. Remove from heat and cool.

  2. Mix in salt, pepper, minced onion or parsley, bread crumbs, and chopped chicken.

  3. Beat the eggs and incorporate them into the mixture.

Shape and fry

  1. Flour your hands and shape the mixture into small, round, flat cakes.

  2. Dip each cake in egg and then in bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in a mixture of butter and lard until golden brown.

  4. Remove with a skimmer and drain on brown paper.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the mixture so the cakes hold their shape, and form a coating that browns when fried.
Flour
Thickens the boiled water into a paste that helps hold the croquette mixture together.
Bread crumbs
Add body to the filling and form a crisp, golden outer coating when fried.
Cooked chicken
Provides the main filling, giving the croquettes their bulk and flavour.

The step that matters

Cool the thickened base before adding the eggs. If the flour paste is still hot, the eggs can scramble or cook unevenly instead of blending smoothly. Cooling first keeps the mixture smooth and easier to shape.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More chicken croquettes recipes

Mock 6Italian 4 See all 418 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes