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Veal Stew

A slow‑cooked stew of veal, salt pork, onion, and flour, served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Veal Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cut the salt pork into slices and fry slowly in a stew pan until light brown.

  2. Add the sliced onion and cook for 10 minutes.

Brown the veal

  1. Cut the veal into small pieces, dredge with salt, pepper, and flour.

  2. Add the veal to the stew pan and stir over the fire for 6 minutes.

  3. Pour in the boiling water.

Thicken and simmer

  1. Mix the remaining flour with a little cold water and stir into the gravy.

  2. Set the stew pan to simmer gently for 3 hours.

  3. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.

  4. Add curry powder just before serving.

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. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  3. Pork + ricetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Becomes tender over a long simmer, giving the stew its main body and meaty flavor.
Salt pork
Renders fat into the pan, adding savory richness to the base for frying the onion and veal.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, adding aromatic depth to the gravy.
Flour
Coats the veal and thickens the boiling water into a smooth, cohesive gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 3 hours. A gentle simmer lets collagen in the veal break down slowly into gelatin, making the meat tender and the gravy silky. A hard boil toughens the meat and can make the gravy cloudy or uneven.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, flour, pepper, pork, rice):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, flour, pepper, pork, rice. 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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