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Cold Meat Cookery

Breaded ham and chicken cutlets served with tomato sauce and fried parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cold Meat Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cutlets

  1. In a bowl, stir together the ham, chicken, seasoning, parsley, and lemon juice until well mixed.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a plate and let it cool until set.

  3. Once set, shape the mixture into small cutlets.

Bread and fry

  1. Dip each cutlet in egg, then coat with breadcrumbs.

  2. Fry the cutlets in hot fat until they are light brown.

Garnish and serve

  1. Insert a parsley stalk into the narrow end of each cutlet to resemble a bone.

  2. Arrange the cutlets in a circle on a serving plate and serve with fried parsley in the center and tomato sauce around.

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. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,031 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Ham + chickentop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Binds the coating so the breadcrumbs stick to each cutlet.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating when fried.
Ham
Adds savory flavor and firm texture to the mixture.
Chicken
Provides the main body and protein of the cutlet mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the meat mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until set before shaping. Cooling lets the proteins and binders firm up, so the cutlets hold their shape. Shaping a warm, soft mixture makes it crumble or slump, and the coating will not adhere well.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, chicken, parsley, lemon, egg, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, chicken, parsley, lemon, egg, sauce. 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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