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Veal Jelly

A chilled gelatinous dish made from veal, mutton, and vegetables boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Veal Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the veal and mutton thinly and break up the bone.

  2. Place the meat, vegetables, salt, and water in a jar.

  3. Cover the jar with a close-fitting lid or several layers of strong paper.

Cook

  1. Cook in a saucepan of boiling water, half-filled, for 4 to 6 hours, or in the oven.

Finish and serve

  1. When slightly cooled, open the jar, strain, and skim off the fat carefully.

  2. Mould the liquid in small dishes and serve cold as jelly.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Veal + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  3. Veal + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mutton + turniptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,558 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Veal + turniptop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,343 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenol (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Knuckle of veal
Its bones and connective tissue release gelatin, which lets the cooled liquid set into a jelly.
Mutton
Adds meat flavour and additional gelatin to the broth as it cooks slowly.
Cold water
Serves as the liquid that extracts gelatin and flavour from the meat over long cooking.
Turnip
Adds a mild, subtly sweet vegetable flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Cover the jar tightly. A close-fitting lid or several layers of paper keeps the liquid from evaporating and concentrating during the long, gentle cook, so the broth stays rich enough to set into jelly once cooled.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celerythe original
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mutton, turnip. 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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