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Ham and Egg Cutlets

A savory cutlet made from ham, egg, milk, and flour, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Ham and Egg Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, combine flour and butter, and mix well.

  2. Add milk, pepper, salt, and nutmeg, and bring to a boil for five minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the chopped ham and egg.

  4. Transfer the mixture to a plate and let it cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the cooled mixture into cutlets using floured hands.

  2. Brush each cutlet with egg and coat in bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the cutlets in hot fat until golden brown.

  4. Serve with tomato 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a stiff sauce that holds the cutlet shape.
Butter
Enriches the base and carries the flour, adding richness and flavour.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a binding mixture.
Egg
Binds the cooled mixture and, brushed on, helps the bread crumbs stick.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour and meaty texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool fully before shaping. A warm, soft mixture is too loose to hold its shape and can tear or slump. Cooling lets the starch-thickened base firm up so the cutlets keep their form through coating and frying.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Cinnamonfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, ham, butter, pepper, milk, 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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