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Veal Stew

A stew of veal with onions, lemon, butter, flour, and a sauce thickened with brown thickening, ketchup, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into neat pieces about 2 inches square or leave it whole.

  2. Rub the veal with butter and place it in a stewpan with the sliced onions.

  3. Brown the veal and onions over medium heat.

Stew

  1. Dredge flour over the meat, then add lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover with veal gravy and stew gently until the meat is tender, about 1.5 to 2 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a separate saucepan, pour most of the gravy and thicken it with brown thickening or flour mixed with cold water.

  2. Add ketchup, sherry, and stewed mushrooms to the thickened gravy.

  3. Return the meat to the gravy, heat through, and serve on a hot dish with gravy poured over it.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Becomes tender during slow stewing, forming the main body of the dish.
Flour
Dredged over the meat to help thicken the stewing liquid and coat the pieces.
Butter
Rubbed on the veal to add richness and help browning in the pan.
Onions
Browned and softened with the veal, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavour of the stewed meat.
Sherry
Added to the thickened gravy to contribute acidity and aroma.

The step that matters

Stewing gently until tender. Veal is lean connective-tissue-rich meat; a gentle, low simmer over 1.5 to 2 hours breaks down collagen slowly. Boiling hard toughens the proteins and dries the meat, so it stays firm and chewy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, lemon, sugar, pepper, meat. 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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