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Cutlets of Fowls, Partridges, or Pigeons.

A dish of fowl cutlets served with bread crumbs and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

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 the strips of flesh under the wings to create at least 9 equal-sized cutlets.

  3. Fry diamond-shaped pieces of bread (snippets) until pale brown and set aside to dry.

Fry the cutlets

  1. Wipe out the pan and dip the cutlets in yolks of eggs mixed with a little clarified butter.

  2. Coat the cutlets with seasoned bread crumbs.

  3. Melt enough butter to fry the cutlets until light amber in color.

Serve

  1. Arrange the cutlets on the snippets, pile them high, and pour 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Mushroom + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 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

Birds
Provide the lean meat that is shaped into the cutlets.
Butter
Fat that fries the cutlets and browns their outer surface.
Egg yolks
Bind the bread crumb coating so it sticks and adds richness.
Bread
Forms the crisp snippets the cutlets rest on and the crumb coating.
Mushroom powder
Adds savoury depth to the cutlets.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich meat and butter.

The step that matters

Frying until light amber. Butter browns quickly once its milk solids toast, so the cutlets should be fried over steady heat until light amber. Too hot and the coating darkens or burns before the meat is cooked through.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, lemon, pepper, bread, 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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