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Cotelettes Aux Haricots — Mutton Steaks with French Beans

Mutton steaks served over buttered French beans with a beaten egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Cotelettes Aux Haricots — Mutton Steaks with French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the mutton steaks and season with salt, pepper, and crumbs of bread.

  2. Cook the French beans in boiling water until tender, then drain.

Make the beans

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and simmer the beans with salt and pepper.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolk to the beans and shake the pan gently, ensuring they do not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve the mutton steaks on top of the French beans.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + beanstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  3. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

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

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Bread + beanstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton steaks
Provide the main protein, whose flavour and juiciness define the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the beans a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Egg yolk
Acts as a binder, thickening the butter and beans into a creamy coating.
Crumbs of bread
Forms a light coating on the steaks that adds texture and absorbs juices.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk to the beans. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently but curdles and turns grainy if it boils. Keeping the pan moving over low heat lets the yolk thicken the butter smoothly.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Peasfits better
  2. Lima beansfits better
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, bread, butter, egg. 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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