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Veal, Ragout of

A veal ragout simmered in stock with tomato sauce, ketchup, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Veal, Ragout of

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut neat slices from the knuckle of veal.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then dredge with flour.

  3. Fry in butter until pale brown.

Simmer and finish

  1. Place in a saucepan with 1 pint of hot rich white stock.

  2. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

  3. Remove the meat and thicken the gravy.

  4. Add 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce, 2 tablespoons of ketchup, and the juice of ½ lemon.

  5. Bring to a boil, return the meat for a few minutes, and serve hot.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Knuckle of veal
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Dredging coats the meat and later helps thicken the gravy.
Butter
Frying in butter browns the surface of the veal and adds rich flavour.
Rich white stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy and carries the flavour of the dish.
Tomato sauce
Adds savoury depth and a gentle acidity to the gravy.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and tang that rounds out the gravy's flavour.

The step that matters

Fry in butter until pale brown. Browning the flour-coated surface creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Stop at pale brown, since over-browning turns bitter and darkens the gravy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, flour, butter, sauce, ketchup, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, flour, butter, sauce, ketchup, lemon. 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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