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Rice Cutlets

Rice cutlets are fried patties made from cooked rice, cold meat, onion, bread crumbs, and seasonings.

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

Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice Cutlets

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the rice and strain it.

  2. Chop the cold meat and onion finely.

  3. Mix the chopped meat and onion with the rice.

  4. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the mixture and mix well.

  5. Add just enough milk to make a paste and let the mixture set on a plate.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the mixture into cutlet shapes.

  2. Dip each cutlet in egg and then in bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in hot oil until golden brown.

  4. Serve with tomato 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 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

Rice
Forms the bulk of the filling and gives the cutlets their body.
Cold meat
Supplies the main flavour and substance of the filling.
Egg
Binds the coating so the bread crumbs adhere and set during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden browned outer crust when fried.
Milk
Moistens the mixture into a paste that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Add just enough milk to make a paste. Too much milk makes the mixture soft and hard to shape, while too little leaves it crumbly and prone to falling apart. Letting it rest helps the moisture spread evenly so the cutlets hold together in the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, meat, bread, pepper, milk, egg, tomato):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, meat, bread, pepper, milk, egg, tomato. 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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