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Salmon Cutlets

Salmon cutlets are breaded and fried pieces of salmon mixed with white sauce and lemon, served with tomato jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Salmon Cutlets

12 cutlets
Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a thick white sauce by melting 2 tablespoons butter, whisking in 2 tablespoons flour, and gradually adding 1 cup milk until thickened.

  2. Mix the salmon and lemon juice into the white sauce.

  3. Turn the mixture onto a plate to cool.

Shape and coat

  1. Divide the cooled mixture into 12 portions and shape like cutlets.

  2. Dip each cutlet in beaten egg.

  3. Coat each cutlet with bread crumbs.

  4. Insert a 2‑inch stick of macaroni into each cutlet to resemble a bone.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the cutlets in deep oil until golden brown.

  2. Serve with tomato jelly.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Salmon + eggtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,485 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Salmon + breadtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together941 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Provides the main filling and flavour, bound into the cutlet shape.
Thick white sauce
Binds the salmon so the mixture holds together when shaped and cooled.
Egg
Coats the cutlets so the bread crumbs adhere and form a crust.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden browned outer coating when fried.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the salmon.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before shaping. A warm white sauce is soft and sticky, so cutlets shaped too early slump and lose their form. Cooling lets the starch set, so the portions hold their shape through breading and frying.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, sauce, pepper, egg, bread):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, sauce, 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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