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Nut Cutlets

Nut cutlets are fried patties made from butter, flour, pine nuts, onion, milk, egg yolk, and seasonings, decorated with macaroni horns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Nut Cutlets

8 portions

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Add the flour and then the milk, cooking thoroughly.

  3. Stir in the grated onion, minced pine nuts, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and egg yolk, mixing well.

  4. Transfer the mixture to a plate to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Divide into 8 portions and shape into cutlets.

  2. Coat each cutlet with egg white.

  3. Insert pieces of macaroni to represent horns.

  4. Fry the cutlets until golden brown and serve with 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pine + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together480 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Pine + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  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

Pine nuts
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the cutlets.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a binding base that holds the mixture together.
Egg yolk
Binds the mixture and adds richness so the cutlets hold their shape.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the base and helps the cutlets brown.
Milk
Cooks with the flour into a soft, moist base for the mixture.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before shaping. A warm, soft mixture is too loose to form cutlets and may crack or slump. Cooling lets the starch and egg firm up so the portions hold their shape when fried.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, pine, milk, pepper, lemon):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, pine, milk, pepper, lemon. 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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