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Fish Cutlets

Fish cutlets made with cooked cod, bread crumbs, flour, butter, milk, pepper, lemon juice, egg, and fried in fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Fish Cutlets

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 ↓

Fish Cutlets

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove skin and bones from the fish and chop finely.

  2. Melt butter in a small pan, stir in flour, and gradually add milk, cooking well.

  3. Mix in fish, bread crumbs, and seasoning, then spread evenly on a plate to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape mixture into cutlets, dip in egg, coat with bread crumbs, and fry in boiling fat.

  2. Serve very hot, garnished 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Cooked cod
Provides the main flesh and flavour of the cutlets.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and milk into a binding white sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that holds the fish together.
Bread crumbs
Add body to the filling and form a crisp, golden outer coating.
Egg
Helps the bread crumb coating adhere and set when fried.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the sauce base.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before shaping. The filling must be cool and firm enough to hold its shape; if it is warm or loose, the cutlets will break apart and absorb too much fat when fried.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, butter, milk, 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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