Skip to main content
Main

Fish Cutlet

A fried fish patty made from boiled fish, milk, butter, flour, egg yolks, and seasonings.

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

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fish Cutlet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Boil the fish in salted water for 10 minutes per pound. Remove the fish and flake it finely.

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, bring the milk to a boil.

  2. Rub the butter and flour together in a bowl, then add the butter-flour mixture to the boiling milk along with the parsley.

  3. Stir in the egg yolks.

  4. Add the flaked fish and mix well.

  5. Season with salt, pepper, onion juice, and nutmeg if desired.

  6. Once cooled, form the mixture into cutlets.

Coat and fry

  1. Roll the cutlets in flour.

  2. Dip the cutlets in beaten egg.

  3. Coat the cutlets with bread crumbs.

  4. Fry the cutlets in hot dripping until golden brown.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main body and flavour of the cutlet mixture.
Milk or cream
Makes the binding mixture moist and creamy, keeping the cutlets tender.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce that holds the fish together.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the mixture so it sets when cooled.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the thickened milk base.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before forming cutlets. A warm, soft mixture is too loose to shape and may break apart. Cooling lets the starch-thickened base firm up so the cutlets hold their form through coating and frying.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, milk, butter, flour, egg, parsley, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, milk, butter, flour, egg, parsley, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesFried FishFried Fish120 recipesFish CroquettesFish Croquettes81 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes