Skip to main content
Main

Veal Shape

A molded dish of veal and ham with sliced hard-boiled eggs, set in its own lemon-flavored gravy and turned out cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Veal Shape

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the veal

  1. Place the veal in a saucepan with the lemon rind and stock.

  2. Simmer gently for three hours.

  3. If the bacon is uncooked, add it for the last half-hour.

  4. Remove the meat and ham.

  5. Cut the bones off the meat.

  6. Return the bones to the saucepan.

  7. Boil quickly without a lid.

Arrange the layers

  1. Hard-boil the eggs.

  2. Slice the eggs.

  3. Arrange the eggs in a mold or dish.

  4. Layer the veal and ham on top of the eggs.

  5. Season the layers with pepper and salt.

Set the jelly

  1. Strain the gravy.

  2. Flavor the gravy and add lemon juice to it.

  3. Pour the gravy over the meat.

  4. Set aside until completely cold.

  5. Turn out the dish.

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. Veal + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Neck of veal
Provides meat and collagen that turns the cooking liquid into a firm jelly when chilled.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, which sets into the jelly around the meat.
Eggs
Hard-boiled and sliced, they add firm texture and a pale contrast within the molded layers.
Ham or bacon
Adds savory, salty flavor and a contrasting texture to the veal layers.
Lemon
Its rind flavors the gravy while the juice adds acidity that brightens the rich meat.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for three hours. A gentle simmer slowly draws collagen from the veal into the liquid without toughening the meat. A hard rolling boil would tighten the muscle fibers and cloud the gravy, weakening the clear, firm jelly.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes