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Boast Pork

A pork fillet coated in breadcrumbs, fried, and served with a mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire gravy, topped with ham or bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boast Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Remove the bone from the pork fillet and set the bone aside.

  2. Beat the egg white until frothy and brush it over the pork.

  3. Dip the pork in the bread crumbs until evenly coated.

Fry and drain

  1. Fry the pork in hot oil until golden brown.

  2. Drain the fried pork well.

Make the gravy

  1. Brown the reserved bone in a separate pan.

  2. Make stock from the browned bone.

  3. Add mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, lemon thyme, and mace to the stock.

  4. Fry the parsley until crisp and set it aside.

Serve

  1. Fry the ham or bacon slices.

  2. Arrange the fried ham or bacon slices around the pork on a serving dish.

  3. Pour the gravy into the dish, avoiding the cutlets.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Pork + mushroomtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  5. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pork fillet
Forms the main body of the cutlet, cooked until tender inside a crisp coating.
Egg white
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs stick evenly to the pork.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating when fried in hot oil.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury depth and umami to the gravy.
Pork bone
Browned and simmered to make the stock that forms the base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Dip the pork in the bread crumbs until evenly coated. Egg white only holds crumbs where it has been brushed on, so bare patches can fall off or burn-brown unevenly during frying, leaving the coating uneven and less crisp.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, egg, bread, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, egg, bread, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, thyme. 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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