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Veal Olives

Veal Olives are rolled veal slices stuffed with veal, breadcrumbs, herbs, and butter, baked with salt pork, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Veal Olives

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the olives

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the chopped veal, stale bread crumbs, mace, pepper, coarse sea salt, sweet herbs, butter, and egg until well combined.

  3. Lay the mixture on the veal slices, then roll them up tightly and secure with skewers or thread.

  4. Lard the rolled veal with salt pork and place them in a baking pan with hot water.

Bake and make the gravy

  1. Bake for about 1 hour, basting frequently with flour.

  2. To make the gravy, melt butter in a pan, add flour, pepper, and salt, and cook until it boils.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the veal olives and garnish with parsley and lemon.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

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

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

Veal fillet
Forms the thin wrapper that holds the filling together and becomes tender when cooked.
Chopped veal
Provides the meaty filling that gives the olives their savory body.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help bind the filling so it stays soft rather than dense.
Egg
Binds the filling ingredients together so they hold their shape when rolled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the filling and to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy by absorbing liquid as it cooks.

The step that matters

Rolling the veal tightly and securing it. If the rolls are loose or the skewers are weak, the filling can leak or fall out during baking. Tight rolling keeps the filling inside and helps each olive cook evenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, bread, pepper, butter, egg, pork, flour. 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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