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Minced Veal

A dish of diced veal and fat simmered with onion, flour, and water, served on toast or baked with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Minced Veal

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.

Make the meat mixture

  1. In a frying pan, combine the diced veal and fat.

  2. Add salt, pepper, flour, and chopped onion to the meat mixture.

  3. In the pan, bring ½ cup of water to a boil and add the coloring.

  4. Stir in the meat mixture and let it simmer gently for 20 minutes.

Serve or bake

  1. Serve the minced veal on toast, optionally topped with poached eggs.

  2. For a baked version, place the mixture in a tin pan, top with bread crumbs, and dot with butter or dripping.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until heated through.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

Roast veal
Provides the main body of the dish as finely diced meat that becomes tender when simmered.
Fat
Adds richness and moisture, keeping the lean meat from drying out during cooking.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the mixture becomes cohesive rather than watery.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavor and sweetness as it softens in the meat mixture.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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