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Veal

Veal finely minced and cooked in gravy or butter-water, served on water toast and optionally garnished with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Veal

6 slices of toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Pick over the cold veal, removing all gristle and uneatable bits, then mince it very fine.

Cook the veal

  1. In a large frying pan, heat the veal gravy or a mixture of butter and water.

  2. Add the minced veal to the pan, stirring often and seasoning with salt and pepper.

  3. Optionally, add a little mace, celery salt, or curry powder.

  4. Cook until the veal shows a slight browness, keeping it moist with gravy or the butter-water mixture.

Serve

  1. Prepare 6 slices of water toast and lay them in a hot dish.

  2. Pile the cooked veal on top of the toast and optionally garnish with lemon slices.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Cold veal
Provides the main meat, which is minced and gently reheated in the pan.
Veal gravy or butter and water
Keeps the minced veal moist while it cooks and heats through.
Water toast
Forms the base that the cooked veal is piled on and served over.

The step that matters

Keeping the veal moist while it browns. Minced meat dries out and toughens quickly in a hot pan. Adding gravy or the butter-water mixture as needed keeps the meat tender while the surface takes on a light colour.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, celery, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, celery, 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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