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Veal in Light Gravy with Parsley

Veal in light gravy with parsley is a simple veal dish simmered in butter, stock, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Veal in Light Gravy with Parsley

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Rub the veal with coarse sea salt and pepper.

  2. Melt the butter in a kettle.

  3. Add the veal to the kettle and turn it several times.

Make the gravy

  1. Immediately add the stock or boiling water and meat extract.

  2. Stir in the chopped parsley and flour dissolved in water.

Cook

  1. Boil for a moment, then cover and place in the Caloric for 1 to 1.5 hours.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Veal + parsleytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,766 recipes

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

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
Main protein; slow, covered cooking in liquid makes it tender and juicy.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, savoury flavour as the veal browns.
Stock or boiling water
Provides the liquid that becomes the gravy and carries flavour into the meat.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells with heat, giving a light body.

The step that matters

Dissolving the flour in water first. Flour added dry to hot liquid clumps, because its outer starch gels before the grains disperse. Mixing it into cold water first lets the grains spread evenly, so the gravy thickens smoothly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Sagefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, butter, 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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