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Egg Cutlets

Egg cutlets are small patties made from boiled eggs, butter, flour, and seasonings, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Egg Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the cream or milk in a double boiler until boiling.

  2. Mix the flour and butter until smooth, then add the flour and butter mixture to the boiling milk.

  3. Coarsely chop the hard-boiled eggs and combine with the butter, onion juice, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and raw egg.

  4. Stir the mixture into the cream sauce.

  5. Cook the sauce until thick.

  6. Add the parsley to the mixture.

Shape and coat

  1. Shape the mixture into cutlets.

  2. Dip each cutlet in the beaten egg.

  3. Coat each cutlet with cracker crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the cutlets in hot oil until golden brown.

  2. Garnish the cutlets with a sprig of parsley or a paper frill.

  3. Serve the cutlets with Piquant sauce and green peas.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the bulk and body of the cutlet filling.
Cream or milk
Forms a thick sauce that moistens and binds the egg mixture.
Flour
Thickens the cream sauce so the mixture holds its shape.
Raw egg
Binds the filling and sets during frying to hold the cutlet together.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, browning outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce until thick. The flour needs to be fully cooked in the hot milk to thicken properly. If the sauce stays thin, the mixture will be too soft to shape and may fall apart during frying.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, parsley, cream, butter, flour, 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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