Skip to main content
Main

Cornish Cutlets

Cold sliced meat coated with potato mash, egg, and breadcrumbs, then fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cornish Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Place sliced cold meat on a dish.

  2. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and parsley. Drizzle with ketchup.

Make the potato coating

  1. Mash boiled potatoes through a sieve. Mix with beaten egg.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and a little lemon juice or nutmeg.

  3. Cover each slice of meat with potato mash, shaping and smoothing with a knife.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip each slice in beaten egg. Coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Repeat the process for a thicker coating.

  3. Fry in hot fat until golden brown. Drain on a cloth.

  4. Serve garnished with parsley.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 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

Cold meat
Forms the core of each cutlet, giving the dish its main body and flavor.
Potatoes
Form a soft mash that binds to the meat and gives a tender layer under the crust.
Egg
Binds the potato mash and helps the bread crumbs adhere to the surface.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp outer crust that browns during frying.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that flavors the meat.

The step that matters

Fry in hot fat until golden brown. If the fat is not hot enough, the coating absorbs more oil and turns greasy before it crisps. Enough heat sets the crumbs quickly and browns them, sealing the cutlet.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, parsley, ketchup, egg, lemon, bread):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, parsley, ketchup, egg, lemon, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes