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Salmon Cutlets

Salmon cutlets are pan‑fried pieces of salmon coated in a creamy breadcrumb batter.

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 ↓

Salmon Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and gradually add the milk or fish stock.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook for 2 minutes.

  4. Add cream, pepper, salt, and lemon juice, then fold in the salmon pieces.

  5. Transfer the mixture to a plate and let it cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cool, form the mixture into cutlets.

  2. Dip each cutlet in the beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry in Hugon suet until golden brown.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Provides the main body and flavour of the cutlets.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the base before the flour is stirred in.
Flour
Thickens the milk or stock into a binding base that holds the cutlets together.
Milk or fish stock
Liquid that cooks with the flour into a thick, smooth binding sauce.
Egg
Binds the coating so the bread crumbs adhere to each cutlet.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp golden crust when the cutlets are fried.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before shaping. A warm, soft mixture is too loose to hold its shape and can fall apart. Cooling lets the thickened base firm up so the cutlets keep their form through coating and frying.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper, egg):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper, 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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