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Cutlets, Pork, Grilled

Grilled pork cutlets served with a sauce of butter, flour, gravy, vinegar, and gherkins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cutlets, Pork, Grilled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim off nearly all the fat from the cutlets and shape them uniformly.

  2. Season both sides with salt and pepper.

  3. Dip the cutlets in warm butter or fat, then coat carefully with breadcrumbs.

Grill and make the sauce

  1. Grill over a clear fire for about 20 minutes, turning three or four times.

  2. In a small saucepan, heat the remaining fat, add the flour, and stir for a few minutes.

  3. Add the gravy and vinegar, boil, season to taste, and stir in the gherkins.

Serve

  1. Arrange the cutlets in a close circle on a hot dish, pour the sauce around, and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pork + vinegartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

Pork cutlets
Lean meat that is cooked through by grilling and forms the main dish.
Butter or good fat
Carries the coating and adds richness and browning to the cutlet surface.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked briefly in fat before the liquid is added.
Gravy or stock
Provides the liquid base that becomes the body of the sauce.
Gherkins
Add sharp, tangy flavour and texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Grilling the coated cutlets. Turning only three or four times over about 20 minutes helps the breadcrumb coating brown evenly and cook the meat through without burning the outside. Too-frequent turning or a fire that is too hot can scorch the crumbs before the centre is done.

“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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