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Veal with Asparagus Tips

A dish of tender veal and asparagus tips cooked with butter, egg yolks, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Veal with Asparagus Tips

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Rub the egg yolks and butter into a paste.

  2. Heat the paste with the milk in a chafing dish, stirring until blended.

Combine and cook

  1. Add the veal and asparagus, then season with salt and white pepper.

  2. Cook for about 5 minutes.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Asparagus + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Asparagus + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Asparagus + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the dish and provides its meaty, savory base.
Asparagus tips
Add tender texture and a fresh, green vegetable flavor to the dish.
Egg yolks
Emulsify the butter and milk and thicken the sauce as they gently heat.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel in the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a creamy body.

The step that matters

Heating the egg yolk paste with the milk. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble and turn grainy if the mixture gets too hot. Stirring constantly while the paste blends into the milk keeps heat even and the sauce smooth.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, asparagus, butter, egg, milk):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, asparagus, butter, egg, milk. 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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