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Minced Veal with Poached Eggs

A dish of finely minced veal cooked with butter, flour, stock, herbs, and topped with poached eggs, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Minced Veal with Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Trim off all brown parts from the veal and mince it very finely.

Make the veal mixture

  1. In a pan, fry the chopped shallot in plenty of butter until light straw color.

  2. Add a large pinch of flour and a little stock.

  3. Stir in the minced meat, parsley, pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Mix well, adding more stock if necessary.

  4. Heat gradually by the side of the fire.

  5. Remove from heat.

  6. Stir in the egg yolk and strained lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried slices of bread around it.

  2. Top with three or four poached eggs.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main minced meat body of the dish.
Butter
Carries the shallot's flavour and gives the mixture richness.
Egg yolk
Enriches the mixture and thickens it gently as it warms.
Flour
Lightly thickens the stock so the minced meat holds together.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich meat and butter.

The step that matters

Heat gradually by the side of the fire. Egg yolk is stirred in after heating, so overheating would scramble it. Gentle, gradual heat keeps the mixture smooth and creamy.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Carrotfits less well
  4. Leekfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, egg. 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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