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Chicken Croquettes

Chicken croquettes made from boiled chicken, sweet milk, butter, onion, bread crumbs, and spices, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the hen until tender, then cool and pick the meat off the bones.

  2. Grind the meat using a meat chopper.

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, bring the sweet milk to a boil.

  2. Add the butter, nutmeg, and chopped onion to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir in the bread crumbs until the mixture thickens to a jelly-like consistency.

  4. Remove from heat and mix in the ground chicken.

  5. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then set aside to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cool, mold the mixture into croquettes.

  2. Roll the croquettes in bread crumbs and fry in boiling lard, rolling them over to cook evenly.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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

Hen
Provides the cooked meat that forms the body of the croquettes.
Sweet milk
Cooked with the bread crumbs to form a thick, binding base for the mixture.
Day-old bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and thicken the mixture so it holds its shape when cooled.
Butter
Adds richness and a soft texture to the filling.
Small onion
Adds savory aroma and flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk and bread crumb mixture before cooling. The mixture must thicken to a firm, jelly-like consistency so the croquettes hold their shape when molded and fried. If it stays loose, the croquettes can collapse or split in the hot lard.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, nutmeg, bread, 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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