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Minced Veal

Minced veal seasoned with pepper, salt, lemon peel, and nutmeg, simmered in a butter‑flour gravy, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the cold veal into slices and mince it very fine with a chopping knife.

  2. Season the minced veal with pepper, coarse sea salt, grated lemon peel, and nutmeg.

  3. Put the bones and trimmings into a saucepan with a little water and simmer to extract flavor.

Make the gravy and warm through

  1. Strain the gravy over the minced veal in a stewpan.

  2. Add a piece of butter rolled in flour and a little milk or cream.

  3. Let it simmer until thoroughly warmed, but do not allow it to boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted and buttered three-cornered pieces of bread arranged around the dish.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold veal
Is the main ingredient, minced fine to form the body of the dish.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Rolled into the butter, it thickens the gravy as it warms.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the texture of the gravy.

The step that matters

Warming without boiling. Simmering gently until just warmed keeps the minced veal tender. Boiling can toughen meat proteins and can cause the flour-thickened dairy to separate or turn grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

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