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Veal Cutlets, with Mushrooms

Veal cutlets served with a mushroom sauce and optional bacon or ham slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Veal Cutlets, with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Clean and trim the mushrooms.

  2. In a saucepan, combine mushrooms, lemon juice, water, and salt. Shake for a few minutes.

  3. Add butter to the saucepan and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, shaking occasionally. Remove from heat and set aside.

Fry the cutlets

  1. Cut the veal into neat cutlets.

  2. Season the cutlets with pepper and salt.

  3. Dredge the cutlets in flour or coat with egg and breadcrumbs.

  4. Fry the cutlets in butter or fat until browned, about 12-15 minutes.

  5. Keep the cutlets warm on a plate.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Drain half the fat from the pan.

  2. Mix flour with the remaining fat. Gradually moisten the mixture with boiling stock or water.

  3. Add the prepared mushrooms and ketchup to the sauce. Let the sauce boil gently for 3-4 minutes.

  4. Layer the fried cutlets with slices of bacon or ham on a serving dish. Pour the mushroom sauce over the cutlets.

  5. Serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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

Veal cutlets
Main protein that browns in the fat and becomes tender when cooked through.
Flour
Forms a light coating that browns when fried and thickens the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture that goes into the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying that carries browning flavour into the cutlets and sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the cutlets until browned. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs a hot, dry surface. Crowding the pan or frying at too low a heat makes the cutlets steam and go pale and grey instead of golden.

“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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