Name: Pork Cutlets and Rober Sauce
Ingredients: 2 ounces butter; chopped shallot; parsley; thyme; mushrooms; pepper; coarse sea salt; pork cutlets; bread crumbs

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Pork Cutlets and Rober Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cutlets

Melt the butter in a stew pan with chopped shallot, parsley, thyme, mushrooms, pepper, and coarse sea salt until half cold.
Dip the trimmed pork cutlets in the butter mixture, ensuring the herbs stick to them.
Roll the cutlets in bread crumbs.

Cook and serve

Place the cutlets in the pan and cook them as you would lamb cutlets.
Arrange the cutlets around the dish and pour the sauce in the middle.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,476 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Enriches the coating and carries the herbs, adding richness and helping the crumbs brown.
Bread crumbs: Form a crisp, browned crust on the outside of the cutlets.
Mushrooms: Add earthy savoury flavour and moisture to the herb-butter sauce.
Shallot: Adds a mild, sweet onion-like aroma to the butter mixture.
Pork cutlets: Form the main protein, which cooks through in the pan and gives the dish its substance.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, thyme, mushroom, pepper, pork, bread):

Shallotthe original
Potatofits about as well
Capsicumfits less well
Carrotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, thyme, mushroom, pepper, pork, 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.