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Restorative Meat Jelly

A gelatinous dish made by simmering veal and beef with a calf's foot, then straining and refrigerating to set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,784 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Restorative Meat Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the meat from the bones and chop it into pieces.

  2. Place the chopped meat in the bottom of a stewpan.

  3. Add enough cold water to rise 2 to 3 inches above the meat.

Make the stock

  1. Simmer gently for 4 hours, skimming off any scum that rises.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Refrigerate overnight to remove the fat.

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. Veal + beeftop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Knuckle of veal
Its bones, connective tissue and collagen release gelatin that sets the stock into aspic.
Gravy beef
Its meat and connective tissue add savory beef flavor and more gelatin to the stock.
Calf's foot
Rich in collagen, it adds gelatin that helps the cooled liquid set firmly.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 4 hours, skimming off any scum that rises. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear, while a rolling boil would emulsify fat and cloud it. Skimming removes impurities that would make the aspic cloudy and muddy in flavor.

“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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