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Mutton Cutlets with Provincale Sauce

Mutton cutlets coated in cracker dust and bread crumbs, served with a creamy thyme sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mutton Cutlets with Provincale Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter over medium heat in a skillet and add the chopped onion.

  2. Stir in the flour gradually.

  3. Add the water and thyme, season with salt and pepper.

  4. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens to a cream-like consistency.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the egg yolks.

Cook the cutlets

  1. Lightly cook the mutton cutlets on both sides in a hot skillet.

  2. Dip the cutlets in the sauce.

  3. Place the cutlets in a pot of hot oil for frying.

  4. Fry until the cutlets float on top of the oil, occasionally rolling them in cracker dust and bread crumbs.

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. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries flavor into the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and add richness and body when stirred in off the heat.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned outer coating on the cutlets when fried.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat and can scramble or curdle if added to a boiling mixture, so the sauce must be removed from heat first.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, thyme, pepper, egg, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, thyme, pepper, egg, 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.

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