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Cutlets of Fowls, Partridges, or Pigeons.

Fowl cutlets made from breast and wing meat, coated in egg yolk, butter, and seasoned breadcrumbs, fried and served with brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

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 pale brown and dry.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the cutlets in egg yolks mixed with clarified butter, then coat with seasoned bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the cutlets in melted butter until light amber in color.

Serve

  1. Arrange the cutlets on the sippets, pile them high, and serve with a 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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 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 forms the body of each cutlet.
Egg yolks
Bind the clarified butter and help the bread crumbs adhere to the cutlets.
Clarified butter
Carries heat for frying and adds richness and golden browning to the coating.
Bread crumbs
Form a seasoned coating that becomes crisp and golden when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the cutlets in butter. Frying until light amber needs moderate heat. Too hot and the crumb coating browns or burns before the thin cutlet cooks through. Too cool and the coating absorbs excess butter and turns greasy.

Swap the mace

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

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

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