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Terrapin Veal

A veal stew with butter, onion, flour, stock, mushroom ketchup, cream, eggs, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Terrapin Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet and sauté the grated onion for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the veal and cook until browned, stirring often.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour, then gradually add the hot stock.

  4. Stir in the mushroom ketchup, salt, and pepper, and simmer for 2 hours.

  5. Add the cream, chopped eggs, and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 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

Veal
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the long simmer.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, body-rich sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow texture to the sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a soft, finely chopped texture to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the onion flavor and adds richness to the start of the stew.

The step that matters

Add the cream, chopped eggs, and lemon juice. Cream can curdle or separate if it boils hard after being added to an acidic mixture. Keep the stew at a gentle heat once the lemon juice goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, flour, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, cream. 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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