Skip to main content
Main

Chicken or Veal Croquettes

A fried croquette made from boiled chicken or veal mixed with butter, flour, spices, and egg, then coated in breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 or Veal Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the chicken or veal until tender.

  2. Reserve the cooking liquid.

  3. In a pan, melt the butter and add flour, pepper, salt, parsley, and onion.

  4. Stir in the minced chicken and beaten egg.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Mold the mixture into croquettes.

  2. Dip each croquette in beaten egg.

  3. Coat each croquette with bread crumbs.

  4. Fry the croquettes in hot 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 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 or veal
Provides the main bulk and protein that forms the croquette filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the filling, softening its texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter and binds the filling so it holds its shape.
Egg
Binds the filling and forms a coating that helps bread crumbs stick.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before shaping. A warm, soft filling is too loose to mold and may split or spill during frying. Cooling lets the flour-thickened mixture firm up so the croquettes keep their shape.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

You might also like