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Veal Olives

Veal Olives are rolled veal slices coated in forcemeat, baked, served with a ragout of oysters, sweetbreads, morels, and mushrooms, topped with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut large slices from the fillet of veal and hack them well with the back of a knife.

  2. Spread forcemeat thinly over each slice and roll them up tightly.

  3. Chop some oysters and mix them with the forcemeat for better flavor.

Make the ragout and gravy

  1. Prepare a ragout with oysters, sweetbreads, morels, and mushrooms.

  2. Make a gravy by combining the good gravy with lemon pickle, walnut ketchup, browning sauce, anchovy sauce, and Cayenne pepper, thickened with flour and butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Roast or bake the rolled veal in the oven.

  2. Place the ragout in a dish with the veal rolls.

  3. Serve the veal olives hot with the gravy and garnish with forcemeat balls, pickles, and pickled mushrooms.

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. Nutmeg + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 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

Fillet of veal
Forms the main meat, which is rolled around the forcemeat filling.
Forcemeat
Fills the rolls, adding moisture and savory flavor as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the veal rolls.
Butter
Enriches the gravy and adds fat for smooth texture and flavor.
Egg yolks
Bind the forcemeat and help it hold together in the rolls.
Oysters (in the method)
Add briny, savory flavor to the forcemeat and ragout.

The step that matters

Roll the veal tightly. Tight rolling keeps the forcemeat inside the slices during roasting, so the filling does not leak out and the rolls hold their shape.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Walnutthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Beansfits less well
  4. Peasfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, nutmeg, bread, egg, lemon, ketchup. 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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