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Cutlets of Fowls, Partridges, or Pigeons.

A dish of fowl cutlets coated in seasoned breadcrumbs and fried, served with 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 the meat

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

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

Prepare the coating and bread

  1. Fry diamond-shaped snippets of bread until pale brown and set aside to dry.

  2. Mix yolks of eggs with a little clarified butter and dip the cutlets in this mixture.

  3. Coat the cutlets with seasoned bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

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

  2. Arrange the cutlets on the snippets of bread, pile them high, and pour rich brown gravy 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
Provide the lean meat that forms the cutlets.
Yolks of eggs
Bind the bread crumb coating to the meat and help it brown.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and carries the egg coating while frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the cutlets in butter. Frying over moderate heat until light amber browns the coating without drying the lean meat inside. Too high a heat scorches the crumbs before the meat is cooked through.

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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