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Cutlets with Gherkin Sauce

Cutlets with gherkin sauce are breaded and fried pork chops served with a sauce of onion, gherkins, lemon, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cutlets with Gherkin Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cutlets

  1. Remove the bones from the chops and cut each into three small pieces, flattening them without losing shape.

  2. Place bread crumbs in one plate.

  3. Beat the eggs and mix in chopped parsley, powdered marjoram, pepper, coarse sea salt, and grated nutmeg.

  4. Heat boiling fat in a frying pan.

  5. Dip each cutlet first in the bread crumbs, then in the egg mixture.

  6. Fry the cutlets until light brown.

Make the gherkin sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, fry the chopped onion in dripping (or cooking fat).

  2. Add salt, pepper, juice of one lemon, and chopped green pickled gherkins to the saucepan, without boiling.

  3. Mix flour and brown sugar with the lemon juice, then stir the mixture into the sauce.

Serve

  1. Arrange the fried cutlets in the center of a dish and pour the sauce 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. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Marjoram + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together957 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Marjoram + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chops
Provide the meat that forms the cutlets and carries the dish's main flavour.
Eggs
Bind the parsley and seasonings and help the bread crumbs adhere to the cutlets.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns when fried.
Gherkins
Add sharp acidity and a tangy flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the cutlets.
Brown sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the sharpness of the lemon and gherkins.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce from boiling. Boiling can curdle or thin the sauce and make the flour clump, so it should be kept hot but not boiling once the lemon juice and gherkins go in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, egg, parsley, marjoram, pepper, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, parsley, marjoram, pepper, nutmeg, 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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