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Minced Veal

A minced veal dish simmered in gravy with catsup, lemon peel, and seasonings, thickened with flour and finished with cream and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the cold veal into small bits.

  2. In a pot, combine the cold gravy and boiling water.

  3. Add the catsup, lemon peel, pepper, and salt.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Simmer the mixture with the meat slowly for 30 minutes.

  2. Make a thin batter with the flour and stir it into the gravy.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir in the cream or milk and butter, and let it boil briefly.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter garnished with fried bread.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold veal
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow simmering in the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a softer, creamier body to the finished gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for smooth flavor and a glossy finish to the gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the flour batter to the gravy. Flour lumps if poured in dry or added too thick, so it should be a thin batter stirred in smoothly. Boiling then cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the gravy thicken evenly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, pepper, flour, cream, butter, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, pepper, flour, cream, butter, 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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