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Cutlets of Fowls, Partridges, or Pigeons.

Cutlets of fowls, partridges, or pigeons served on bread sippets with brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cutlets of Fowls, Partridges, or Pigeons.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the flesh from the breast and wing of the birds, yielding 6 large fillets.

  2. Flatten additional strips of flesh to create at least 9 equal-sized cutlets.

  3. Fry diamond-shaped sippets of bread until dry. Set the fried sippets of bread aside.

Cook the cutlets

  1. Dip the cutlets in yolks of eggs mixed with clarified butter.

  2. Coat the cutlets with seasoned bread crumbs.

  3. Heat butter in a pan. Fry the cutlets until light amber in color.

Serve

  1. Arrange the cutlets on the sippets of bread. Pile the cutlets high.

  2. Serve with rich brown gravy or Espagnole around them.

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

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Birds (fowl, partridge, or pigeon)
Provide the lean meat that is shaped into the cutlets.
Yolks of eggs
Bind the coating so the bread crumbs adhere to the cutlets.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and helps the cutlets brown evenly when fried.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating around the cutlets when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the cutlets until light amber in color. Frying over moderate heat browns the crumb coating through Maillard reactions while the lean meat cooks through. Too high a heat scorches the crumbs before the inside is cooked.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, pepper, 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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