Skip to main content

Cold Meat Cutlets

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cold Meat Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour, then add stock, salt, pepper, and ketchup; boil for 3-4 minutes.

  3. Add the minced meat and bread crumbs; mix thoroughly.

  4. Spread the mixture on a large dinner plate and let it cool.

  5. Divide into 12 equal parts and shape into cutlets.

  6. Insert about 1 inch of cooked macaroni into the thin end of each cutlet.

  7. Beat the egg and brush it over each cutlet.

  8. Roll the cutlets in the remaining bread crumbs.

  9. Fry in hot fat until light brown; drain on paper.

  10. Arrange neatly in a ring on a serviette or lace paper and garnish with parsley.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, ketchup, bread, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes